Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Hero Origin Stories: Round 2

This week we are doing things a little differently! Long time listeners have probably heard our first SRHR Hero Origin Stories podcast, where we talked to a number of amazing heroes in the field of reproductive health, rights, and justice and heard about how they began working in this space. We have reprised one of our most popular podcast episodes and talked to more leaders about their work, their passions, and their journeys into reproductive health!

 Guests include:

 Jennie Wetter with the Population Institute and RePROs Fight Back

Katherine Olivera with the International Women's Health Coalition

Sarah Craven with UNFPA

Jessica Mason Pieklo with Rewire.News

Nina Besser Doorley with the International Women's Health Coalition 

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back a podcast on all things repro. I'm your host Jennie Wetter. In each episode, I'll be taking you to the front lines of the escalating fight over our sexual and reproductive health and rights at home and abroad. Each episode, I will be speaking with leaders who are fighting to protect our reproductive health and rights to ensure that no one's reproductive health depends on where they live. It's time for repros to fight back.

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Jennie: Hi everyone and welcome to this week's episode of RePROs Fight Back. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter. This week we're gonna do something a little different, but that we have already done before. So longtime listeners may recognize this as an episode we did last year, which is where I talked to a bunch of people who work in reproductive health, reproductive rights and reproductive justice. They come on and tell their story either about how they got started working in this field, how they get their current job, you know, kind of whatever their origin story is. It's one of our most popular episodes. So I thought it would be really fun to do it again with a whole new group of people. So I already told my story on the last one we did. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and tell it again. And who knows? It might be a little different this time so that you know, if you haven't listened before you can still hear what my story is. So my origin story is a little bit like a bunch of seeds planted along the way, that took a long time to like all of a sudden just blossom and be like, “Oh my God, this is what I'm passionate about”. So it was a bunch of little things. So you've probably often heard me talk about, I went to Catholic school from K-8 and so that meant when I had sex ed, I was at Catholic school. I had sex ed from a nun. As you can imagine, it was super comprehensive as in not at all, very much the, I like to refer to it as the mean girl variety. The, you have sex, you're going to get this horrible disease and you're going to die version of sex ed. So you know things that are not super helpful later in life when you're trying to negotiate having sex and having healthy relationships. So that was seed number one, something that stuck with me but didn't make a huge impact right away. Seed number two was kind of around the same time, maybe a little bit before that one again, Catholic school. One of my friends asked me to go with her to go to Madison to go save babies. I mean, yeah, no, I absolutely, I'm going to go save babies, like who doesn't want to go save babies? Like obviously that is what I'm going to do. I’m all excited to go home and tell mom, “so this weekend so-and-so asked me to go to Madison with her to save babies. Can I go?” And my mom, I remember so clearly and I think the best part of it is while it is such a clear memory to me, when I talked to her about it later in life, she's like, yeah, I have no memory. So while it was such a big deal to me, to her, it was just normal everyday parent thing. But I remember her sitting me down mean like, “sure, let's have a conversation first”. And so she doesn't tell me what I can or can't do or what I should think or not think. She just very nicely is like, “Hey, have you thought about what if a woman is in X situation? Have you thought about if this was happening in the woman's life, have you thought about this? Or what about that?” And after she's done having this conversation and kind of walking me through all of the reasons why going to Madison to protest at Planned Parenthood is not the right choice without using those words. She asks me, “do you still want to go? If you still want to go, you can go”. And just being very like, “no like that, no, that's terrible.” And so it stuck with me not just informing my pro-choice opinions that I would very strongly develop but throughout my life it also taught me decision making, right? Don't just take what someone tells you, dig in and learn more information and then go forward. So that was seed number two and again it takes a while to develop. Seed number three was being in an unhealthy relationship in high school. Towards the end it was, you know, looking back later you understand better that it was abusive and not healthy things that again, seed that was planted and dealt with. Later in college I decided to major in environmental studies. So totally mostly completely different from repro. But while I was in school and at the University of Wisconsin, I did a study abroad in Kenya and it changed my view in that, before I was thinking domestic environment type things, and it got me much more interested in environment and development and where they come together. So that was, you know, a bit of a seed there kind of just getting outside the U.S. and being in really rural Kenya away from like a major city. It just gave me a whole different perspective on the world and it informed a lot of my thinking later. And then I went to grad school, for global environmental policies, still kind of focusing on environment and development. And when I graduated from grad school it was 2006 and the job market was a little shakier and I was having a bit of a hard time finding a job or at least the job I thought I wanted. So I ended up working for the place where I still am, which is the Population Institute. And you know, it seems like the opportunity to talk about environment and development was looking at population. So I started working there and slowly my job became much more working in reproductive health and rights and women's empowerment and all those seeds that had been planted throughout my life all of a sudden just burst into full bloom. And the thought of like going back and working in the environment or even development, which is where I had spent so much of my focus and my education is just incomprehensible to me. While they are very important areas, my real passion I have found is working in reproductive health rights and justice and you know, moving forward, that is absolutely where I would continue to work. And it's been so much fun to take this passion and funnel it into a podcast where I get to talk to all these amazing people that I work with on a day to day basis and show off how super smart all my friends are. And yeah, so that's what this episode is going to be about and I'm going to have a lot of people that I work with telling their stories of how they came to work on reproductive health, rights and justice. So enjoy.

Katherine: Hi, my name is Katherine Olivera. I am a program associate at the international Women's Health Coalition. IWHC is a feminist organization that champions the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls worldwide. Together with our partners, we bring truth to the halls of power and we advocate for global norms, global treaties and agreements on sexual and reproductive health, including in U.S. foreign policy as Grantmakers. Our focus is to provide support to organizations, women, and young people where frontline advocates are in communities. So my story starts at the age of seven when I saw a documentary on doctors providing health services to women and girls in humanitarian and complex settings. And I remember thinking to myself, well first of all I was really, really sad, but I remember thinking to myself, “wow, these providers are some of the most selfless people in the world and when I grow up I want to be just like them.” So I entered undergrad pursuing a degree in biology with a premed track. I had recently been accepted into Virginia Commonwealth University acceleration program, which is an advisory and preparatory program for students pursuing a professional degree in health. So at the time I felt really secure about my future. It wasn't until sophomore, early junior year that I realized I had no interest in learning about plants or bugs. I didn't think it was necessary for me to know the anatomy of a beetle to advance to med school. So I opted and changed my degrees from biology to international studies. And instead of taking courses like entomology, I loaded on courses related to global women's health, women peace and security, black feminist theory. And it was here in these classes that I realized that being a physician really didn't mean much if there were harmful policies that dictated the ways I could or could not provide health care. So from that moment on, I knew I no longer wanted to become a physician and instead I wanted to focus on a career in health policy. It was also during undergrad that I was sexually assaulted. I didn't know whether I'd become pregnant or not, but if I did then I needed and I wanted an abortion. I had Google searched abortion care providers in Richmond, Virginia, just to learn that Virginia had recently been subjected to a slew of targeted regulation against abortion providers, so TRAP laws, and that meant that if I wanted an abortion then I would have to skip multiple days of classes in order to make the multiple trips and in return my grades would suffer. I knew that I'd have to get a vaginal ultrasound and after being sexually assaulted. That was the last thing I wanted. Also the procedure I believe costs around $400 and that was a lot of money and a lot of money I did not have as a college student. Thankfully I wasn't pregnant. I had taken emergency contraception, but even accessing that was difficult because they didn't have it over the counter at the pharmacy. I actually had to ask the pharmacist for it and I remember feeling really embarrassed, really ashamed of myself and I really hated myself and my body. So it was my lived experiences, my trauma and my studies in gender and women's health that confirmed my desire to work in sexual reproductive health and rights. So shortly after graduating I came across a job posting shared by a sorority sister of mine, shout out to Lambda Theta Alpha. It was a, it was a posting for a health educator at an independent abortion care provider and I remember thinking to myself, this is such an amazing opportunity, one that I probably will not get. So I immediately jumped on it. I spent almost three years working as a health educator and community outreach coordinator at Falls Church Health Care Center. A lot of my job consisted of providing counseling to pregnant people seeking abortion and working with abortion funds to help cover the costs of a procedure for a person who needed that financial assistance. One of Virginia's TRAP laws is to provide state directed abortion counseling and then again having the pregnant person wait 24 hours until they're able to access their abortion. So as a provider, as a feminist, I found it really difficult to abide by the law while providing genuine, compassionate and quality care. Most of the people I saw were immigrants and Spanish speaking in their home countries. So a lot of my time was also spent with them understanding that in Virginia abortion is legal. It's just heavily restricted. As a community outreach coordinator, I brought my experiences and the experiences of the people I saw and I testified in front of the Virginia board of health in hopes to amend some of these TRAP regulations. And it was there that I was introduced to the larger reproductive health rights and justice world. I was in awe with the advocates to coalitions and the solidarity that was being exemplified in that room and I knew that one day I would want to work in reproductive rights, really focusing on health policies and laws, but for the moment I was still okay with being a provider, so flash forward to 2016 and the election results, I remembered going to work after the elections and feeling really defeated on their campaign. The Trump administration really had some nasty rhetoric around abortion and that was demonstrated at Falls Church Healthcare Center where we were victims of multiple bomb threats. Our protesters senses grew drastically and we were constantly being harassed and followed by the protestors. I remember feeling distraught and numb after reading that within the first 72 hours the Trump administration reinstated and expanded the global gag rule and all of this was enough to serve as a catalyst to, you know, it, it sparked something in me. There was a little voice in my head that said, Kat, you spent good years working within reproductive health and now it's time to get in the trenches and start working in reproductive rights using an encompassing a reproductive justice framework. So that's where I am today at IWHC defending and advancing the health and wellbeing of all people, especially marginalized communities like adolescents, LGBTQ and sex workers. All people deserve to live healthy, dignified, and just lives. I don't know where I will go after IWHC, but I do know that wherever it is, I'll be taking my values with me.

Sarah: Hi, this is Sarah Craven. I am the director of the Washington office for UNFPA. My origin story started in 1987 when I moved to Washington D.C. I had no job, I had no place to live and I was couch surfing before couch surfing even existed. And I ended up getting a job with my hometown Senator from Hawaii. His name was Spark Matsunaga and I had moved to D.C. thinking I was gonna take the city by storm and be working on human rights, which was what my interest was. And I ended up finding myself doing Capitol tours and wrapping up boxes of chocolate covered macadamia nuts to give to other senators. But the faithful moment that changed my career and my career trajectory was taking my resume and back then free internet, we used to put resumes in little brown paper boxes and when Senate offices were looking for staff they look in the box and see who came up. So my resume was picked up by the office of Senator Ken Worth. I interviewed and got an opportunity to work on his staff and that pretty much changed my career. I worked on women's reproductive health issues from a domestic context for him and then decided that I wanted to go to law school. Wet spent three years focusing on international law, international human rights. And when I came out of law school, well I, it was kind of tracking right with the time when the world was coming together. Yeah. In a series of international conferences and that was [inaudible]. The moment that really, that got my career off was getting to work for a small NGO called and the [inaudible], that's a network of women leaders around the world who were helping to think about shape and advocate for a rights-based based approach to family planning and population policies. At the 1994 international conference on population and development in Cairo, Egypt. So what was cool about that opportunity was my former boss Senator Worth was now the head of the U.S. delegation to the Cairo conference. And my boss at the nonprofit, Peggy Curlin was on the U.S. delegation. So that was probably the best job I've ever had in my life. Getting to work with grassroots women leaders from around the world, working with them, to lift their voices and help shape policy at a global stage through Cairo. And then the next year in Beijing. So I did that for a couple of years and then Senator Worth, now undersecretary Worth invited me to come work for him at the Department of State. At that point would have been the five year anniversary of Cairo and it was just right around that time that he got the opportunity to start the UN foundation and I was given the opportunity to work for UNFPA. So at the time I thought, yeah, wow, the UN is super bureaucratic. I'm not sure this is what I want to do. And it's turned out to be just an incredible opportunity for me to be able to continue to advocate and promote the, ICPD agenda again, continue to work with amazing colleagues all around the world. And that just culminated last week when I was in Nairobi, Kenya seeing many of the formerly young leaders, that I knew 25 years ago now be on the global stage. And I think most rewardingly for me was to see of the new young leaders for reproductive rights, “25 under 25” Emma Hartley, my former intern and the granddaughter of Peggy Curlin so I knew everything has come full circle. Thanks for letting me share my origin story. I feel really lucky to be able to do this work. That's all.

Jennie: Thanks Sarah.

My name is Jessica Mason Pieklo and I am the interim president and editor in chief of Rewire.News and the VP of law in the court. I am a legal journalist where I report on reproductive and sexual health and rights and justice from legislation to litigation. I love my job and I kind of came into it through an interesting array of circumstances. I got into abortion rights advocacy work via the Affordable Care Act. So I am by training an attorney and an academic. It had been [inaudible], totally invested in abortion rates and the abortion rights movement, but had not really considered that in terms of professional advocacy or work. And then, uh, the Affordable Care Act happened and I found myself as an attorney who had a background in health law insurance law and a strong interest in constitutional law. And all of those pieces came together because of a huge fight over abortion rights coverage in the Affordable Care Act. And I found myself as a legal academic at the time, writing very generalized pieces about what the Affordable Care Act would mean generally. And then also specifically for reproductive rights and healthcare coverage and that started a career in journalism and I have not looked back since. I consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to do analysis and commentary and record a podcast all focused on the attacks, on our fundamental reproductive autonomy. It is the issue that is paramount and I think without reproductive autonomy we have no economic security, we have no way to fully participate in our lives. As citizens, it is so crucial to everything that we do. And so it is a tremendous honor to be able to do the work that I do. People ask how they can get involved in do similar things, particularly if they are law students or considering going to law school. And I encourage absolutely all of that. There are so many ways, if you are a lawyer or a law student to be involved in advocating for reproductive rights and justice, and it doesn’t necessarily mean challenging anti-abortion restrictions in the state or in the federal government, but it can be. We are seeing the increase of the criminalization pregnancy outcomes. So we need prosecutors who understand that pregnancy loss is never a crime. That is something that people can do. We need folks who want to be judges and understand that your fundamental rights does not depend on what state you live in. So there are lots of pathways into this work and hopefully we get as many people in on the fight as we can.

Jennie: Awesome. And I just want to throw in there because for some reason in all of the many titles I’ve read about you I forgot to add host of the podcast, Boom! Lawyered, which is amazing and everybody would love it. Yeah.

Jessica: Boom! Lawyered does a ton of fun stuff, my cohost Imani Gandi and I take complex legal issues around reproductive rights and justice and try to break it down and give people something to be angry about and something to feel hopeful about in that process. So please, if you would be so generous and listen, we would greatly appreciate it.

Jennie: Yes, it's definitely that. And your and Imani’s coverage is definitely the first places I turn when there is something happening in the repro justice world to check out what I need to know.

Jessica: Oh, thank you so much for that ringing endorsement. We are thrilled to hear it.

Jennie: Okay. All right, well thank you Jess.

Jessica: Yeah. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Nina Besser-Doorley. I work in advocacy for the International Women's Health Coalition and I got into reproductive health work and into advocacy sort of by accident. I had wanted to work in a more research based field and when I graduated from graduate school I thought I had everything lined up. I was in the final phases of interviewing for what I thought was my dream job with a dream organization. I knew the supervisor well and I got all the way to the end and at the last minute I didn't get the job. And I found out that I didn't get the job because the person interviewing didn't think I was tough enough and didn't think I could handle dealing with tough issues and tough people and those kinds of things, which really stuck with me. And when I left grad school, I just started my job search again. I came across an opportunity to go to work in Congress and I didn't think I wanted to be a Hill staffer. I didn't think I wanted to do politics. I hadn't even taken a politics class as an undergraduate, but the member in question had a reputation for being a really, really good but tough progressive member and a tough place to work. And I thought if I worked for her for a year, then no one's ever going to say about me again. That I'm not tough enough and I can't handle difficult situations and difficult issues and difficult people. So I took the job and this was the end of 2006 beginning of 2007 right after Democrats took control of the House for the first time in ages and it was this amazing opportunity to explore all of these policies, actors, and ways that legislation is made. The drafting process. I never experienced any of this. I hadn't done a congressional internship. I hadn't done an internship in this field at all. I had no idea how the sausage was made. I remember on my first day asking if I had to, I provide my own Blackberry or if the office would give me one, and I worked for her for about a year and when I started thinking about do I want to go back and try to get a job back in the field, I'd thought I'd wanted to be in. I realized that I, I really liked working in politics and I really liked the process of making and developing legislation and all of the opportunities that were afforded to me being on the Hill. So I ended up instead taking a job with Congressman Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois and working for Jan was just the most incredible experience. She's an incredibly vibrant, dynamic lawmaker. She cares passionately about the work that she does. She treats her staff like family and it was just the coolest experience to be brought into this office. And she hired me in 2007 to do foreign policy and at the time she hired me, it was mostly a security based portfolio. It was the Iraq portfolio, it was the Iraq or and related issues. But with the incoming Obama administration there was sort of an opportunity to step back a little bit from that work and to look at other areas of her interest and see what I might want to develop out. And what really rose to the forefront was, was gender and women's issues specifically. And through the course of working for Jan, I got the opportunity to work on some really what felt like important and critical pieces of legislation on women. And what kept coming up was this idea of reproductive health and what does legislating on reproductive health do two other women's issues and other gender. She's how does it interplay and how, how do these issues play out? And time and time again, I was told, you know, don't torpedo our bill with your repro language. “Don't force a conversation on abortion because it's going to undermine this whole thing.” And that just really time and again stuck with me that there was this complete willingness, not by my boss, but by many in Congress and many in the political sphere at the time to sort of to say, we'll deal with these issues later. We'll deal with abortion later, we'll talk about reproductive health later. We don't want it to undermine other things that we care about.

Jennie: So glad things have changed, right?

Nina: We've come so far and it became more and more frustrating. It became this like, well, you know, you can't talk about maternal mortality without talking about abortion. You can't talk about gender based violence without talking about comprehensive services for survivors, which access to reproductive healthcare and abortion. And it just felt like the political dynamics meant we were having these incomplete conversations. So that made me more and more passionate about this issue. And the idea of making sure that reproductive health is part of these conversations, not just when we talk about abortion or a bill specifically on abortion, but when we talk about the complete spectrum of gender issues and of health issues and all of the places that this fits in. So I ended up leaving the Hill after the 2013 government shutdown. It was sort of my, I think I've been in Congress long enough and you know, when you work in Congress, you're sort of a Jack of all trades. You have to deal with all the issues that come your way. But when you leave, you get the sort of luxury of deciding what are you really passionate about and what do you want to spend your time and your, your professional life building expertise. And this was the one that rose to the top for me. It felt like reproductive health needs people who understand the process, who understand the ways these sausages are made in Congress and are willing to sort of say this has to be part of the conversation. This can't be dealt with later. We're not going to, you know, pass the bill and then talk about abortion. So that's sort of how I looked for a job in this field and have been here ever since. Hello, I'm a superhero.

Jennie: I hope you all had as much fun listening to that as I had recording it. It was so great to talk to everybody and hear their stories of how they came to work on reproductive health, rights and justice. They're all different, but I'll have these little nuggets that are the same so it's been a lot of fun. So that's it for this week. I will see you all on our next episode. If you want to have topics you want us to cover or you have comments about this episode, always feel free to reach out. You can email me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can reach out to us on social media, on Facebook and Twitter, at Repros Fight Back, or you can also find us on Instagram at ReprosFB.

Jennie: Thanks for listening everyone. And we'll see you on our next episode of RePROS Fight Back. For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website at reprosfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at RePROS Fight Back, or on Instagram at reprosfb. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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