Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Hero Origin Stories: Round 3

This week we are doing things a little differently! Long time listeners have probably heard our SRHR Hero Origin Stories podcast AND our SRHR Hero Origin Stories podcast: Round 2, 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 our most popular podcast episodes and talked to more leaders about their work, their passions, and their journeys into reproductive health for a third time!

Guests include:

Lienna Feleke-Eshete, Senior Associate of Public Policy and Movement Building at the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE)

Zara Ahmed, Associate Director of Federal Issues at Guttmacher Institute

Erin Matson, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Reproaction

Monica Edwards, Federal Policy Manager at Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity (URGE)

Jennie Wetter with the Population Institute and rePROs Fight Back

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to RePROs Fight Back, a podcast where we explore all things reproductive health, rights and justice. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and I'll be helping you stay informed around issues like birth control, abortion, sex education and LGBTQ issues and much, much more-- giving you the tools you need to take action and fight back. Okay, let's dive in.

Jennie: Welcome to this week's episode of RePROs Fight Back. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my preferred pronouns are she/her. So ya’ll, we have made it. It is election day. If you are listening to this episode, when it comes out, and if you're listening to it in the future, hopefully, you know the results and we are able to move forward. I hope everybody has gotten out and gotten a chance to vote. Like I said, we're going to keep this episode really light and upbeat and not focus on the stress of the election. We're also not going to talk about the Supreme Court situation and what's happening. I'll do an episode on that in the near future so we can dig much fuller into that and the upsettedness of it and the rage and all of the things. But we're not going to do that today because we all need something a little happier right now. And so that leads me to doing my favorite episode and I think a lot of your’s favorite episode. So thank you for everybody who voted and asked us to do this episode. It is our SRHR hero origin story episode. And I got a lot of great stories for you today. I'm really excited for you all to hear them. I love this. I work with all of these people often quite a bit, and I don't know all of their stories and it's always so exciting to learn everybody's stories and see how we all came to repro from a different place. It's one of my favorite episodes we do, because it's just so much fun to me. I hope you all enjoy it. I think with that, there's nothing else really exciting going on right now for me to talk about in my life, same old, same old, still in quarantine with the two kitties, nothing super exciting for Halloween. We did do an office zoom where we all dressed up and that was a lot of fun. I got a really fun colored wig and wore that for our office zoom. It was just nice to take some time out and be silly. So that's the only thing new and super exciting with me right now. I hope everybody is holding up okay. And taking some time out when they are able to deal with all of the stress of everything right now and what that let's turn to everybody telling their stories. So I've told my story on the podcast before. So, some of you may have heard it. Some of you have may not have heard those episodes. So, what I'm going to do to make it easier for people who have already heard it, and don't want to hear it again, I'm going to stick my story at the very end. So that way you can listen to everybody else's stories. And if you don't need to hear mine again or want to hear mine again, you don't need to, to it. So it'll bethe very last one. So with that, enjoy everybody's stories.

Lienna: Hi, my name is Lienna Feleke-Eshete, and I'm the Senior Associate of Public Policy and Movement Building at the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE). And here's my SRHR origin story. I appreciate you asking this question, Jennie, because I feel sometimes like I just ended up in repro, but your question has forced me to sort of reflect on my life. And it's quite clear that this is where I was meant to be. So some background about me is that I'm a first-generation American to two parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia, which is a country in East Africa if you're not familiar. My parents were never super religious, but they were relatively conservative, even though they're both highly educated people. And so I remember being younger and on occasion, when we would go to church, seeing that men and women were seated in separate areas and that women would have to use a scarf, which is traditionally called a netela in the Ethiopian culture to cover their hair inside the church. And I was like, that's odd that the women have to do all of these things. And the men don't really have to do anything. They can just walk into church as they are. And then once I got my period, I remember my mom telling me that if I was on my period, I couldn't go to church. And when I asked her why she explained that it was traditionally considered unclean to go into a house of worship during that time a month when you're menstruating. And when I heard that I was really frustrated and I was like, this is because it's not like getting my period is something that I chose to have happen. It's not something that I enjoyed happening and it's not something that I could have prevented. And I didn't feel like that was fair. And as I got older, I started to notice subtle differences in the way that men and women were treated in my family and the communities that I was in-- the way that they could dress or behave in our culture. And how patriarchy was so deeply ingrained that even the most educated "modernized,” if people still gave into it, still internalized it, whether they realized it or not. And one example is my mom, who's a trained medical doctor in Ethiopia, once told me that if I used a tampon, I would lose my virginity. She either said that or that tampons were only for people who are no longer virgins. And if she's listening, sorry, mom, she's, I hate that I'm telling this story, but she's a medical doctor. She's a trained physician. And it's just so clear that no matter how much you learn, no matter how much education you have, the culture and stigma around sex and around security and women's bodies is just so incredibly pervasive, not only in Ethiopian culture, but in American culture as well.

Lienna: And so when I went to college, a lot of my friends got into relationships, became sexually active. And I started to see these same patterns of stigma, of victim-blaming, hyper-sexualization, toxic masculinity and their encounters then within the Black community on campus. And so by this point, I was so frustrated, why is sex this big taboo thing that nobody talks about, almost everyone in their lifetime have sex at least once. And why is what we know about sex so inaccurate and so focused around male pleasure and patriarchy and respectability politics. And so I was like, I want to learn more about this. I started to read a lot of books about feminism. I started to follow self-proclaimed activists and people on Twitter, started to click around on Twitter. And I was able to unlearn so much of what I picked up about sex and sexuality and virginity and all of those things from my relatively conservative background and from my lived experience as a Black woman in the U.S. and actually, while I was in college, I had an internship with a non-profit in DC, which I will not name, but I had a really eye-opening experience there when there was a lot of videos in the news about Black girls being assaulted by school police. And they were videos and people were really riled up about how to make schools a safe place for Black girls and why are police even in schools. And I remember someone had brought it up in a staff meeting at this internship, and the organization basically decided that they didn't want to take a statement I'm on it, despite it being very clearly within their field of work. And that was one of many experiences that I have had in the nonprofit sector. And then the public service sector as a Black woman, where I was sort of taken aback by how clear it is that when organizations are talking about feminism and women's rights, organizations are talking about white women, they're talking about wealthy women when they're talking about able-bodied women and they're not talking about people like me. They're not talking about people like my family members. They're not talking about people like my friends, and that was really frustrating for me. And so after, when I graduated, I took a job in the U.S. Senate and I was doing immigration casework, which I did really enjoy. I loved working directly with constituents, but it was a lot of work. And when the Trump administration came into office, the work I was doing was really hindered by anti-immigrant and xenophobic policies coming out of the administration and also given all of the anti-abortion and anti-choice policies that were coming out of the administration as well. I decided that I wanted to work in women's rights and reproductive rights full-time. And from there, I took a job at Planned Parenthood of DC, and there, I was able to sort of get my foot in the door, into the reproductive rights movement. I learned a lot about policy, did some electoral organizing grassroots organizing. And then after that took a job at change. And it's really telling that my reproductive justice and reproductive rights work has been both domestically focused and internationally focused because I find myself very torn between two homelands, almost. I care very much about the U.S. and U.S. politics and reproductive justice in the U.S. context. But I also care very much about my family members who are young women or girls who still live in Ethiopia and making sure that they have all the access to the resources that I have had access to. And that sort of can do the unlearning that I have been able to do and really empower themselves to take control over their lives and their bodies. So that's pretty much it.

Zara: Hi, my name is Zara Ahmed. I use she/ her pronouns, and this is my story. The first chapter is really about my two grandmothers in India. And I remember going back and visiting them every few summers, and they really shaped the way that I thought of what it means to have a family and to be a woman and the challenges that people face. So one of them was married at 16 and had her first child at 17, followed quickly by three more. The other one had seven children in less than 10 years while living with my grandfather in a little one room, not even one bedroom, one room apartment, and neither of them were really able to go to school. And I saw how hard it was and how they struggled to raise their families, which they did. They had a lot of love and care for their families, but it was tough. And my parents also saw how hard this was and they wanted something different for themselves. So even though both of them are totally obsessed with babies, they were clear that they only wanted two kids. So they were really clear that they only wanted two kids and they waited about five years after they got married to start having children. So it's just me and my brother. And so that really shaped the way that I thought about what it means to be in control of one's reproductive future and destiny…I think especially when you come from a big family and especially in my mom's case, when you come from not a lot of money and you see how, what a struggle it is, it really shapes what you want for yourself. And to say, I don't maybe want to struggle the same way. I see the benefits of a big family, but maybe I don't want that for myself. So I think it's amazing that they were able to see that together and make the change that they wanted for their life. So for me this continued when I was a kid, I was always a strong, mighty little feminist. I want it to be White House chief of staff. When I grew up, I worked for the Maine state legislature when I was in high school. When I was 16, I started taking classes at Colby College, which was in my town on international relations and women's history. I started the gay straight alliance. I was always involved in feminism and social justice and progressive causes just how I was born and how I was raised apparently. And then the next step was when I went to college. And even though I was a feminist and a progressive my family, we didn't really talk that much openly about sex. And at Brown, where I went to college, I was able to take the female sexuality workshop class. And I ended up teaching it four times because I really fell in love with empowering women and people of all genders to understand and explore their own sexuality. And again, really feel empowered to be in control of themselves and their bodies. At the same time, I was also a political science major. I worked for now Representative Cicilline when he was mayor of Providence, I interned for a Republican congressmen on the Hill because I really wanted to understand how the other side thought about issues, especially abortion rights.

Zara: So I was always at this intersection of reproductive health and justice and political science and public policy. So then I went to grad school and that same thing continued this bridging of public health and public policy. So I was working while in grad school for three years as a sexual health counselor at a last chance high school. And I loved it really again about empowering people and individuals, many of whom already had children to think about what they wanted for their future in terms of their families and themselves. I also, during grad school had a lot of opportunity to spend time working overseas. So I did a lot of time in Cambodia, Senegal, and Cameroon and in Kimbra. And I had the unforgettable and searing experience of holding a 21-year-old woman's hand, as she gave birth in an abandoned, dilapidated health center to her fourth child. And I watched as she refused to hold the baby because it was a girl and they named the baby Zara in honor of me as the guest in their village. And I think a lot to this day about how different the course of our lives will take because of the opportunities afforded to us just because of where we were born. So after grad school and all of this time working overseas, I was lucky enough to get a job with CDC in Rwanda, working on health systems issues. And so I spent the next seven years working with CDC in Rwanda, Namibia, and Haiti. And I eventually moved up to be the head of policy and communications for the global health security division at CDC headquarters for three years. And during my years at CDC, I fought to bring gender and SRHR into the work, whether it be on HIV/AIDS or post-earthquake recovery, or the Ebola response, but it still felt like I was missing the chance to really focus and make change and regrow. So that's brought me to this current chapter at Guttmacher, which has been fantastic. And I get to say what I want and bring all those threads together, the personal passion and story. My time spent overseas, my time at local state and federal government and the love of collaborating with amazing people around the world, including people like you, Jennie. So that's where I am. And that's my story.

Jennie: Thanks for sharing.

Zara: Thanks so much for having me

Erin: I am Erin Matson, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Reproaction, and this is my activist story. When I was a kid, I read several newspapers and I was really interested in progressive politics. I started phone banking for what would have been Minnesota's first woman Senator in middle school. And I used to skip high school and have to dodge high school police on grounds so that I could campaign for the late Senator Paul Wellstone, my senior year in high school, I developed an eating disorder and nearly died, which is another story, but it impacts this one because in coming out of that, I realized that I wanted to do everything I could to prevent someone else from having to go through what I did. And in particular, I connected my eating disorder to a world that pushes women and girls in all aspects of life to take up less space. So that's how I moved into feminist activism explicitly. My first reproductive rights focused campaign was when I was the youngest state president in the country. I was elected at age 23. And at the time this was the early 2000s. There were stories cropping up that pharmacies were denying people their birth control prescriptions because of the personal beliefs of the pharmacist, which is total BS, so we started picketing outside of CVS as they were coming into the Minneapolis area for the first time to let them know. Then we shifted our sites to Walgreens. And actually, I was super proud of this. At the time I was 24 years old sitting cross-legged in a studio apartment with like no furniture. And because of a rally that we were playing a picket and protest of a very popular area, well trafficked store in the uptown Minneapolis area, Walgreens caught wind of it, wanted us to cancel it. And I'm like, you want to cancel it? We need concessions. So I actually personally negotiated for hours on the phone with bigwigs at Walgreens and got them to put in writing guarantee that if a person was going to get their prescription and a pharmacist didn't want to prescribe it because frankly they're bigoted that they would ensure that the person had access to it in store that their pharmacist would actually drive over and give it to them immediately versus forcing the person to go on a wild goose chase in search of their birth control. Walgreens has not always headed to that. I still have that in writing. If anyone needs it, please do come find me. And that is from corporate. And so from there, my activism took off even more. I was very active in the National Organization for Women. I was action vice-president from 2009 to 2012. And I actually left that position early because I knew the activism was changing. And as a young woman, myself, I really felt torn between these two worlds and wanted to be focused in an area where I thought I could be most effective. So I went from there to doing more writing and organizing. This has been a theme of my life for a time. I was an editor or at large at what is now Rewire News Group, awesome publication. And then I co-founded Repro ction with Pamela Merit, my co-director and we launched organization in 2015. And in particular, during my time at now, I had come to see how the women's movement was being treated as a ladies, auxiliary of the democratic party and how even when we had a democratic president and a democratic majorities in Congress, we were still getting sweeping new abortion restrictions put into law. I had also witnessed and been a part of the power of non-violent direct action. And I have lots of stories. I love to tell about that, but it, in particular, I want to lift up a former LGBTQ equality group called Get Equal that was organizing people to chain themselves to the White House fence in protest of don't ask don't tell, and I have no doubt in my mind that it was because of activists were willing to be unpopular that we've got, don't ask don't tell off the books. So that's the story. Please check out our work at reproaction.com

Monica: Hi, my name is Monica Edwards. I use she her pronouns and I currently work as the Federal Policy manager at URGE Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity in the DMV area, originally from Alabama. So not from the DMV, proud southerner, but I've been here in the DC area for about two years now. And how did I get into reproductive health rights and justice? So it's actually very funny story because this was not the career choice I would have taken for myself. So I graduated high school and went to college and I went to the University of Alabama--roll tide-- to all of my crimson tide fans that are listening. And I thought I wanted to be a doctor for most of my life. And then I went to college and saw the course load and it was like, nope, that's not happening.

Jennie: Oh my God. I relate to that. I got a BA instead of a BS because I refused to take more math.

Monica: I'm very horrible at math. Math after two plus two, I get confused. So, uh, so I was like, no, that's probably not a good career choice. And so I had always been interested in criminal justice, like behavioral analysis type of stuff. So I'm a criminal minds fanatic. Um, I wanted to be a profiler. And so I studied criminal justice for four years at the University of Alabama. And so my plan was to go to the FBI, right. And then something just told me to go to law school. I'm not actually sure why. I will say Legally Blonde had a little bit to do with it, but I was like, why don't I try law school? Especially because Alabama folks really don't know, but Alabama is actually a pretty good law schools within the top 30 in the country. So I was like, okay, I'm already here. Why not go to law school? And so I went to law school and I originally thought I wanted to be a prosecutor. Y'all don't shoot me for saying that. I didn't understand. I was like, okay, I'll be a prosecutor. And then I was like, no, I'm going to be a defense attorney. And then I really did like trial stuff. I still do like trial work. Um, I think it's really exciting just being in the courtroom, but I graduated or got ready to graduate and my mentors in law school…and they taught at Berkeley for a long, long time, and they came to the University of Alabama. And there are some of the originators of critical race theory in the law. So really amazing folks and mentors. And they came across the, If, When, How reproductive justice fellowship and was like, “Hey, you've been in like all of our classes,” which I did two or three a year. Most of my classes were with them and they became my mentors. And they were like, “you would be really great for this. You should apply.” And I was like, okay, I don't really know what this is about, but sure. I need a job at the law school because all the things that I had applied for, it was not panning out. And I applied for the fellowship and did an interview for the first round, got into the second round. I completely bombed the interview; a lot was going on and it was not a great interview. So I actually, initially didn't get picked, then luck would have it somewhat ended up not being able to do the fellowship that year. And I got an email from someone like, “Hey, are you still interested? We'd love to have you come join.” And I was like, okay, cool. I still didn't have a job then. So it's a job. I'll take it. So as it develops, that's the way the law school I studied for the bar throughout the summer, failed the bar first time, which is completely normal. And folks didn't know Hillary Clinton did not pass the bar first time. I don't think. Or Michelle Obama. So just FYI, if you have not passed the bar, it's totally fine. You'll still be a lawyer. You'll still be fine. But I was kind of like, okay, I don't really need the barring anyway, I'm not going to be practicing. So did all that, flew to DC maybe a week or two after the bar got settled in and started my RJ fellowship at URGE. And it basically was a totally new world for me because policy wasn't really something I was into or thought I would be into.

Monica: I much more thought I wouldn't be doing the legal stuff. I don’t know. It was a really hectic and good year in the fellowship. I got to do a lot and I got to meet a lot of amazing people. Now, our folks who did the fellowship with me who were at other organizations. And so when the time came to end the fellowship, our executive director Kimberlina McGuire was kind of like, would you like to stay on? And I was like, sure. And so I stayed on at URGE. And so now I'm the federal policy manager at URGE because I did a fellowship that I thought I was not going to like, and I did it. And now I'm kind of just in the repro world, which was not what I saw myself doing. But yeah, all that to say, if you have a plan, throw it out the window, it's probably not going to happen the way you have it today. And you're probably not going to end up in the field that you think you are going to, or I would just say, just be open-minded because it really was something that I wasn't expecting, but I ended up really liking the policy just because being in the legal field, it can be really constraining. There's a lot of respectability politics you have to navigate, especially being someone who is a platform in and trying to like navigate all the micro and macro aggressions that happen in the legal field. I mean, and in movement spaces as well, but the legal field a lot. And I just knew that I wanted to do something not as traditional. And it ended up being repro and now I get to work with amazing folks and amazing organizations that are dedicated to securing sexual and reproductive health and rights and justice for people who need it most. So, yeah, that's how I ended up in the reproductive health rights and justice movement.

Jennie: I really love that. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about your path. It's not going to be what you think it's going to be, because that is so true. And I think when I get interns, they're always so worried about having the perfect next step. What do I do next? Do I go to grad school? Do I take this internship? And they're always just so stressed that there is the thing they need to do. And now, man, it's messy. You just go to a thing and you either love it or you don't and move on to the next thing. And I mean my background's environment and now I couldn't imagine working in environment.

Monica: Again, I do parts of the law. I've got two in law school. My two are fellowship…. And I really did like the legal aid work, specifically the family law. So if I ever ended up back in law, that would probably be the route I would go, but I never thought, Oh yeah, you're going to work for reproductive health rights and justice organization. And you're going to talk to legislators about why they need to secure abortion access, then other issues within reproductive justice all day. Nope. I never saw that coming, but I mean, just don't plan, but don't be mad if it doesn't pan out the way you think it will, because it usually is better than what you could have ever foreseen for yourself. I mean, I get to interact with the offices of like Ayana Pressley sometimes. I mean, I think that's better than it being in a courtroom with a judge for a few hours, trying to convince them to do the right thing. So I'm just saying, follow your heart and just go with the flow because they usually will be much better than what you could have thought or seen for yourself. And don't think you'll have it figured out by a certain age because you won't at all.

Jennie: Not at all. Monica, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Monica: Of course, of course. No, thank you.

Jennie: I'm Jennie Wetter and I am the host of rePROsFightBack. My pronouns are she/her. And I'm also the director of public policy at the Population Institute. My origin story is not a straight line. I didn't have one moment was like, this is what I want to do, or this is what I'm going to be. You know, when I was young, I had so many other ideas, you know, I thought about being a children's defense attorney. I thought about doing any number of other things, but being a reproductive health and rights advocate seems so just something I would have never considered. You know, I talk about, I didn't have that moment, but I had a lot of little seeds planted along the way. And I think one of the first major ones was when I was in the sixth grade. I can't remember exactly. And you've heard me talk about it on the podcast. Before that I went to a Catholic school and kindergarten through eighth grade. So when I was in fifth or sixth grade, one of the other girls in our class came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to Madison with her and save babies that weekend. And I mean, who doesn't want to go save babies? I can't believe that babies were being hurt. Obviously. I want to go with her to save babies, get all the details. And I'm so excited. I'm going to go save babies. And I go home and ask my mom and my mom just looks at me like, huh, okay. And so she sits me down and I can still really picture this. We had a breakfast bar and so I'm sitting there on the end and the seat that was usually my dad's and mom was standing in front of me talking to me and she didn't tell me what to think or anything like that. She really just kind of sat me down and told me stories or asked me if I had thought about if the person was in this scenario or that scenario, did I think that they should be able to have an abortion? And she kind of explained it to me. I was kind of young, particularly going to Catholic school. We didn't have sex ed yet. That would have been helpful. We'll get to that. But she really just kind of explained it to me really basically, and asked me about all these other situations. And then she did something that I think was super important to me. And she didn't tell me that I couldn't go or that I could go. She just said, listen, now that you have thought about all these things, do you still want to go? If you want to go, you can go. But if you don't that's okay. And after all of the things she said, thinking about it all, there was only one answer. No, obviously I'm not going to go. No. And is this the moment I became a pro-choice advocate and reproductive health rights and justice advocate? No, I mean, it's probably the moment I became pro-choice and supported people's right to access abortion, but it wasn't a game changer to me and it wasn't a passion or something I could see myself working on. It just didn't occur to me that way. But I think what it really did and what was really important was two things. And that is, it taught me to think about things differently and to ask questions and figure it out for myself. I think one of the most important things is it taught me about empathy, to think about other people and what they're going through and their situations.

Jennie: And I'm just so grateful to this conversation. And for that, I think it really taught me to put myself in other people's shoes. And I think that's a really important trait that my parents instilled in me. But, one of my favorite things is when I have the talk about this conversation, I've asked my mom about it is she doesn't remember. So as much as it was life-changing to me and burned into my memory, it was just another day of parenting for her. So put a pin in that being the first thing that happened, it planted a seed, but yeah, it didn't become anything major. Next again, Catholic schools. So when we had sex education, I don't know, in sixth or seventh grade, I don't really remember. I describe my sex education as the Mean Girls style of sex education, you have sex, you get this horrible disease and you're going to die. And that was it. Right? I had sex ed from a nun. There was not any sort of talk about healthy relationships or consent or any number of things. Birth control only in so much as it was about birth control not being effective. And you shouldn't use it, which obviously we know is not true. It was just so unhelpful. And it really just shame just instills; such a sense of shame around sex and healthy sexual relationships that I think for a lot of people, myself included, it is really hard to shake and get rid of, it really sticks with you for a really long time. So was that a moment that became my moment of this is what I'm going to do now? It's just something that happened and shaped my life for a long time, but it wasn't something I thought about then, right. I really took in the education I was getting, which was very shame-based and that sex was something dirty and you didn't do it, which was not healthy later in life, but this was like another one of those seeds that might flourish. So we have the usual dealing with the aftereffects of having terrible, terrible sex ed, not teaching you about healthy relationships. I went to college at the university of Wisconsin Madison. And at that point I decided what I wanted to do was work in environmental studies. I wanted to, to fight for a healthier planet and mostly focused around work in the U.S. and that's was what I was looking at, but this great opportunity came up to do a study abroad. And I saw this amazing one that was in Kenya. And it, this is going to be the simplest of simple versions. And there's so much more laxity that I could talk about some other time, but for the sake of, of brevity and knowing I'm fully not capturing the scale, I'm just going to say, we're dealing with human wildlife conflict. So the area we were in was near the Tanzania border and the Masai who lived there were looking to develop, but the area they were on is really important to the wildlife in that area, but they also get money from the wildlife in that area.

Jennie: So it was like trying to find the balance of how they can develop and also keep the wildlife that is key to Kenya's economy, but also was helping the Masai. It really made me look more at environment and development and where they come together and really made me focus more on those type of issues than domestic or even just environment. So when I went to grad school, I studied global environmental policy. I went to grad school at the school for international service at American University and got my degree in global environmental policy and wrote my thesis on environmental peace building. So again, not at all in repro, right? It was hard to find a job when I graduated and I didn't find one doing what I wanted to do and what I saw myself doing. And I saw this job opened up at the Population Institute and I was like, all right, I guess, environment and development. This is kind of where they come together. I guess this is what I'll do. I'll apply. At least what's the harm. So I got the job and started working, not on environment and development issues, but on reproductive health and rights issues. And you know what, all those seeds that had been planted along the way, all of a sudden just exploded and was like, oh, this, this is my passion. I love working on reproductive health and rights. This is so important. And this is what I need to do. And if you had told little Jennie back in fifth or sixth grade, who was asked by a friend to go save babies in Madison, if this is something she could ever see herself doing, I would have said, no. If you had asked high school Jennie, if this is something she would've seen herself doing, no. College Jennie, no. So this was just a great opportunity that fell into my lap. That would let me find this amazing passion that is going to be leading part of my life for years to come. I just can't imagine going back and working in the areas I thought I would be working on right now, wherever I go, I will be continuing to do this work to make sure that everybody has reproductive freedom. And so that is my definitely not straight line to how I got to where I am at the Population Institute and hosting this podcast. So that's just to say, don't be discouraged because your path didn't go the way you thought it would. You might all of a sudden find this new passion that you didn't know you had that leads to a great opportunity. I think that I got really lucky and I loved doing what I'm doing, getting to talk to people about this. I love getting to do the podcast and talking to y'all. So that is my origin story. I hope y'all enjoyed it.

Jennie: Okay. I hope you enjoyed hearing everybody's story is as much as I did, honestly, these really are my favorite episodes. I really enjoy doing them. And again, just thank you, everybody for voting. I really, really appreciated hearing your feedback. Maybe sometime later, we'll do the, ask me anything episode, but I think that this one was the right choice for election day to do a storytelling. One. I think that really worked out perfectly. And with that, we'll be back in two weeks, unless we maybe do a bonus episode on the Supreme Court. I don't know. I haven't quite figured out what we're doing yet, but there'll be one on the Supreme Court very soon.

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.