Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Hero Origin Stories: Round 8

There’s still time in the year to hear from leaders and advocates in the sexual and reproductive health and rights field! On this episode of our most popular series, SRHR Hero Origin Stories, we talk to a number of amazing heroes in the field of reproductive health, rights, and justice about how they began working in this space. On this episode, hear from Lupe Rodriguez, Executive Director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, Dr. Monica McLemore, Professor at New York University’s Rory Meyer’s College of Nursing, Samira Damavandi, Senior Policy Associate for Federal Issues at the Guttmacher Institute, and Jennie Wetter, Director and Host of rePROs Fight Back.

If you haven’t already, check out our previous episodes, SRHR Hero Origin Stories: Round 7, SRHR Hero Origin Stories: Round 6, SRHR Origin Stories: Round 5, and more.

For more information, check out Amicus with Dhalia Lithwick: https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus

Transcript

Jennie: 0:35

Welcome to Repro Spike Bat, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health rights and justice. Hi, Repros. How's everybody doing? I'm your host, Jenny Wetter, and my pronouns are she, her. So, y'all, it is the holiday season, so we decided to give, instead of taking the last two weeks off at the end of the year, we decided to give you a special bonus holiday present and do one more round of SRHR Hero Origin stories. This round is gonna include my story, but if y'all have been listening to the podcast for a while, you've already heard my story on all of the previous versions we have done. So I am going to put my story at the very end. So if you don't want to listen to it again, you don't have to. Yeah, I am so excited. We have so many great people uh sharing their stories. And with that, let's go to this next round of SRHR Hero Origin Stories.

SPEAKER_03: 1:30

Hey, reprose fight back, folks. It is the Monica. I am Dr. Monica McLeamore. I use she and her pronouns. And my journey to sexual and reproductive health is a simple one. I've talked about this quite a bit, and you can YouTube it and Google it and a whole variety of things, but I'll summarize it here for you. Number one, I was a premi in 1969. I was born at 32 weeks, and if you know anything about the United States and healthcare, you know that prematurity is the number one cause of infant mortality around the world. One in nine babies will be born prematurely. And in Trent, New Jersey, where I was born, at that time they didn't collect statistics for anybody but white people, and the prematurity rate was one out of 16 people for white people, but it was one out of 32 for all others per 100,000 births. And so it was double the rate. So I'm both lucky and grateful to be alive. But that's not how I got a reproductive health rights and justice work. I'll tell you two different stories that will give you some context around this. One was as a student, the other one was as a roommate. So, as a student, I had an incredible mentor in my nursing program, Dr. Susan Ballon, who was the first person who taught a course called Power Politics Feminism in Nursing Practice. And she, in fact, was the first person that ever introduced me to Faye Waddleton, who was the first black woman president of Planned Parenthood. And she opened my eyes to a world that helped me so much that I decided to interview my parents for my baccalaureate thesis in nursing and to talk with them about their lives. And anybody who knows me knows I have Vanguard, badass, incredible parents, and you know, who both are, you know, evangelical, religious, very religious people, but socially very liberal. And so it was never odd for me to reconcile a social justice mission and liberal work along with being very deeply religious because I watch my parents do that all the time. So fast forward, I got my first apartment and I was living with my roommate, and I talked about this when my chapter came out in Untold Stories: Life, Love, and Reproduction, a book that was published to really tell stories of people whose stories had never been told. And I'm a child is by choice person. I always knew I never wanted to be a parent because that requires courage and belief in the future that at the time I didn't have. And I was living with my um high school best friend, we were roommates, and I never forget she ended up uh having an unintended pregnancy with one of the bartenders at the places where she worked. And I remember she had an uneventful, uncomplicated procedural abortion at Planned Parenthood, and she ended up having a good amount of bleeding. And as a nurse and a nursing student, you know, I never re I realized I never was taught what was normal and what wasn't. And so I ended up um, you know, having to work through all of the issues of not knowing how to help take care of her, and ultimately we got her methrogen and was able to get her bleeding under control. But I felt so helpless in that moment, and I will never forget thinking to myself, I will never feel this way again. I had no specific feelings or thoughts about abortion, that wasn't the issue. It was I felt like as a roommate and as a friend of somebody who cared about this person, I didn't know how to get them the care that they needed. I ended up calling the clinic, I ended up calling the uh triage and advice nurse we ultimately got her care for, and she was fine. But I thought to myself, this is too hard. It shouldn't be this hard. And so that's when I really committed myself. And I've only worked with child-bearing families my whole nursing career, people with capacity for pregnancy. And I will never stop fighting to allow for us to operationalize reproductive justice and for people to have the reproductive trajectories and the lives that they want and need. So I'm very grateful for you. I'm grateful for the work that you do, I'm grateful for everybody who believes in a different future. And quite frankly, regardless of how you feel about abortion, family putting, contraception, surrogacy, infertility, birth, parenthood, whatever, adoption, that you don't get to decide those things for other people. Because the only arbiter of any reproductive health decision and any pregnancy decision are the people who have to live with that decision. Thank you for the opportunity to tell my story, and I am very much listened looking forward to listening to this series and grateful to be a part of it. Thank you.

Jennie: 6:13

Hi, Samira. Thanks for being here. Hi, thanks so much for having me on. I'm so excited to hear your origin story. So tell us how you got involved in this work, but maybe take a second at the start and introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 6:29

Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Samira Dama Vandy. I use she or her pronouns. I am the Senior Policy Associate for Federal Issues at the Gutmacher Institute. A little bit about me, I am originally from California. I've been living in the Washington, DC area for the last eight years. And I had always been really interested on issues relating to gender and quote unquote women's issues. Um, when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, I did a minor in gender and women's studies. And so that was always something that I wanted to work on and was passionate about. And even though I didn't do that as my major, I incorporated it into my thesis, and my focus was on women's political participation in Iran in the 1950s to 70s. So I'd always been kind of coming at it from that perspective and angle. And I had an opportunity in undergrad to work as a volunteer for an organization that's based in Iran. It's called the OMED Foundation, and Omid means hope, that worked with women and girls that are marginalized, that basically provided them some training, some work opportunities for folks who had been victims of abuse. And that was an organization I was really proud to be a volunteer for. And so I kind of always was really interested in kind of mixing my interests of politics, the Middle East, and women and gender issues. So that's kind of where my original interest in reproductive health and rights came about. And on another note, my grandmother, who's no longer with us, she unfortunately was not able to continue her education past high school. She married very early in Iran. But one thing she always told me is that she had wished that she was able to be an OBGYN. And so that was something that was so interesting to me is just kind of having that this interest in reproductive health be something that spanned generations. And it was something that was kind of always openly discussed in my family as it related to menstruation or just reproductive health in general. So yeah, I was lucky to have a mom and grandmother that were open to talking about these things. Yeah, but I think where my real interest in repro kind of came from, after I went to grad school in the UK, I had some friends who were involved in the repeal of the eighth movement to repeal the Eighth Amendment and the Irish constitution that prohibited abortion in Ireland. And so I was really lucky to have been surrounded by really interesting and like-minded individuals that were passionate about this issue and they themselves were Irish. And so that's kind of where my interest also in reproductive health and rights sparked. And I ended up moving to DC after grad school, working in the policy space, a different issue, but uh was always really interested again in gender and women's issues. And I had an opportunity to be the inaugural Congressional Progressive Caucus Center's Women's Rights Fellow. And I was placed in Congresswoman Barbara Lee's office to be her women's rights fellow, and that really kind of led me to where I am today. I'm really grateful for that opportunity. And I worked on various issues in the office, but as she was the co-chair of the pro-choice caucus, as it was named at that time, the reproductive freedom caucus, I was really able to dive deep into all things repro and got to work on her bills as a fellow, and then ended up getting hired as a legislative assistant in her office, where I handled the reproductive health and rights portfolio and uh her bills, like the Global Her Act and the Each Act. So that really was where you know everything really began and got to know where I am now. I love that.

Jennie: 11:14

I feel like I talk about my story and how it's not a straight line, like it's a bunch of like little moments that all of a sudden I got a job where I got to work on these issues and it like exploded, and like I couldn't imagine like not working on them now. But like my background like in undergrad and grad was environment. And so obviously I am now our sexual and reproductive health rights and justice expert, but no one's path is straight. And I I that is my favorite part about these stories.

SPEAKER_01: 11:42

Yeah, definitely. I'm just glad to be where I'm at now and have been working on SRHR issues for the last eight years or so, and so I hope to continue being in this field for the foreseeable future. Thanks, Samira. Thanks for sharing your story. Thanks, Jenny.

SPEAKER_00: 12:02

My name is Lupe Miriam Rodriguez, and I am the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. And this is a story of how I got into the reproductive justice movement. My path was pretty circuitous, but really when I look back, I think it started when my family and I immigrated to the US from Mexico when I was three years old. We came to the United States to find health care for my brother who uh had spinal muscular atrophy, but we didn't know this when we came to the US. We came because we couldn't find any information about him or about what was happening to him in Mexico. He couldn't walk and he had little mobility. And so we knew we needed answers. And we came to the U.S. where my family, part of my family was already established. We came to the Bay Area, San Jose, California, and lived with my grandmother when we first arrived. My grandmother was the matriarch of our family, having moved to the U.S. to care for her 11 children after my grandfather had abandoned her and wasn't helping her care for the kids. And so I grew up with my grandmother, who was this powerful, incredible woman, with my own mother who helped us navigate a really difficult situation in the US to find healthcare for my brother. You know, not knowing English, needing to talk to doctors, talk to insurance plans. She really set an example of what strength and dignity and advocacy looked like for me. And I was also compelled and moved to be a part of supporting my family in that. I remember translating documents and having conversations with doctors and helping make phone calls because I was able to learn English really fast as a kid. And I think it set me up for, you know, the knowledge one that there were inequities that people faced, but also for a lifetime of standing up for what was right. I think I was always compelled to step in when there was a lack of leadership or a lack of support for someone, and was always ready to ask for what we needed. I was moved in those moments by my mom's example, by my grandmother's example to advocate and to know what my rights were and to ask for them. And so that was how I was raised. And I think throughout my life, I carried that spirit with me in various parts of my life. But my focus was actually in science. My ultimate career goals were centered around lab research and you know, thinking about my brother's condition and how to discover how this happened, how this happened and how it could be changed. And so I studied science. I went to Harvard for undergrad and was set to be on a path to become a scientist. I, you know, got into graduate school and was beginning my career in research and faced a ton of inequity, discrimination, and ultimately made the decision to leave my program. And I I think when I look back at that time, that I was obviously under duress in a program that was difficult on its own and made even more so because of the discrimination I faced. And that that that changed my mind about what what and how it was that I would make an impact in the world. And I decided that activism and advocacy was a place where I could have more impact. You know, I thought if I couldn't have an equitable experience in my career in science because of sexism and racism, how could I combat this? And how could I make it better for people who would come up behind me and into that career? And so I left my program definitely with a lot of heaviness and decided to go to Mexico to do research with an organization that was working on maternal mortality and reproductive rights for women in Mexico, an organization called Salud Integral para la mujer. And there I, you know, learned about the long-standing criminalization of abortion, the effects it has on maternal death, on infant mortality, on you know, adverse health outcomes. And I became really interested in what that looked like in the US as well. So when I came back from my year in Mexico, I got a job a little randomly at Access Reproductive Justice, which is an abortion fund that has been in Oakland, California for many, many years and served a large proportion of California now is a national abortion fund. And that's where my career started. I learned about this was in 2008, pre-Row uh falling. And you know, I learned about the inequities in access to care, even in a state like California, with the best laws, with the best, you know, most equitable programs for care, with access to Medicaid for abortion. And I, you know, just became interested in the impact this has on people's lives long term. And so I that was the start. I um I grew in my career there. I uh was able to start the first policy advocacy component of the fund. I worked to pass policy to expand Medicaid access for abortion and to work on some administrative advocacy with local social service agencies that were denying, wrongfully denying Medicaid for people who wanted abortions. And then from there, I was recruited to work at Planned Parenthood Marmonte, which is the largest Planned Parenthood affiliate in the country, and you know, was was it at the time thinking a lot about issues of Medicaid access for abortion and for reproductive rights in general to make it easier for providers to be able to serve Medicaid patients. And I found my time at Marmonte to be incredibly instructive in organizing, in policy advocacy. I also helped lead our action fund and our endorsement process and our campaigns, learned how to run a campaign for candidates and really grew in my in my career there. And I got to a point, though, where I realized that where I thought the movement needed investment and growth and uh attention was in organizing. And so when I got a call in 2020 from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, as they were doing their executive director search, I you know, I felt like the call for me that I'd been kind of having in the back of my mind that I'd been discussing with colleagues about how to change investment and advocacy, I felt almost like there was like a divine kind of Moment of connection to where I knew the movement needed to go when I got that call. You know, I'd known about Latina Institute, I'd known about the work for a long time, and I never thought that I could I could work there or I wanted to work there necessarily. I was, I thought so much about how I could grow the investment where I was. But it was it was faithful in many ways. It felt faithful. I don't know if I believe in that, but I got the call, I thought about it, I talked to my family about it. And I, the more I learned about Latina Institute, the more I learned about the work that we do, the more I felt like this was the place where I was going to be able to do the kind of work that I knew, based on all of my experience in the movement, was necessary for now, was necessary for us to build the kind of future we needed to win for our communities, to win for our rights, to win for people all around the country. And I feel that to this day, five years into my role at Latina Institute, I found my home in this movement that took me in after I left my career in science. And I'm it's been it's been a hard year as I'm as I'm recording this note, a hard year for the movement, a hard year for bodily autonomy, a hard year for communities that have already been impacted by lack of access to care and lack of compassion and dignity. It's been a hard year for our team at Latina Institute. And yet I remain hopeful for the movement because of the work I do here, because of our politosas, our activists, because of the people that we move every day toward reproductive justice. And that's where we are today in my story, sharing this emotional voice note about my path and about the future and where I think we're going to land, which I which I firmly believe is in a good place for our families, for our communities, for our children. And I'm excited to be in this movement at the front, leading a brilliant team toward toward the future I know we all deserve. Thank you.

Jennie: 23:01

Hi, I'm Jenny Wetter. My pronouns are she, her, and I am the host of the Reprose Fight Back Podcast and the director of the Reprose Fight Back Initiative at the Population Institute. My story, I always say that my story is complicated. You know, it's really kind of hard to trace an exact, like, this is the thing that made me who I am today. I moments of things I am. I think the one that most of you, if you've listened to the podcast before, are familiar with is I went to Catholic school. I had sex ed from a nun, which as you can imagine, was neither comprehensive nor particularly fact-based or science-based, just in ways that were utterly unhelpful for years to come. And so that was like point one, and something I carried with me of this very unhelpful, terrible, mean girl's variety of sex ed. You know, you'll you have sex, you're gonna get this horrible disease and you're gonna die. And then the next point was probably maybe even before this, I don't know, they were around the same time. I was in like fifth or sixth grade. I want to say fifth grade. It was, I feel like I was pretty young. One of the girls in my class asked me if I wanted to go to Madison with her to go save babies. And like, yeah, obviously, I want to go save babies. People are killing babies? That's terrible. I need to go do something about that. So I remember going home and I just have like such a clear memory of like sitting at our breakfast counter on a stool and talking to my mom about could I go to Madison with this friend to go save babies? And having her sit and talk to me and really just, you know, she didn't tell me yes or no or like what to think. She was just like, okay, like let's have a bigger conversation around what is happening and around abortion and what that means. And, you know, have you thought about if a person was in X situation? Or what if a person was in Y situation? Or what about this? And she just really centered it on the pregnant person and their lives and their decisions in a way that, you know, I'm sure I never got at Catholic school, right? And, you know, after that whole conversation and really, again, focus on the pregnant person, mom said, okay, so now that you know more about it, if you want to go, you can still go. You can go. And she gave me the autonomy to make my own decision. And, you know, this is one of those things that like it probably didn't have like a huge effect on me at the time. And spoiler alert, I did not go to the protest, but it became to mean so much in ways of knowing my parents had gave me the autonomy to think my own thoughts and make my own decisions about what I believed in things. It didn't necessarily have big reverberations for me all of a sudden being, you know, a pro-abortion advocate right away. But again, it was just like another one of those like little nuggets that like led to where I'm at now. And I think honestly, maybe even the more important part was the giving me the autonomy to make my own choices. And and that was really important to me. I it's so funny. As I started doing this work, I talked to my mom about it, and she does not remember this conversation, this big life-changing conversation that was so important to me. Uh, it was just another day of parenting for her, which I think also says a lot. I think the next like big moment would be when I was in college. I decided to study environmental studies. And I went on a study abroad program to Kenya, studying human wildlife conflict, and it really got me interested in development and looking at the ways that development can be done to protect wildlife, but also to make better lives for the communities that are impacted by by the by the wildlife in the in the area I was in. So that led me to graduate with an environmental science degree. And then I moved to DC and went for grad school and started to do global environmental policy. So kind of wanted to look again at that where environment and development meet. So I did a lot of work there. I wrote my thesis, for lack of a better word, on environmental peace building. So again, focusing on the people and how peace building around peace parks works. And then when I went to graduate, I didn't find a job doing exactly what I thought I wanted to do. And I ended up working for the Population Institute because maybe that was like where environment and development came together. Although I rapidly became our sexual and reproductive health person and have left my environmental portfolio far behind, clearly. And so then all of these like little moments of things that happened over the years like all came to bloom, just like exploded, and like this, this is your passion, this is what you care about. You want to focus on sexual and reproductive health and make sure that people are getting, young people are getting good sex ed, they are given the autonomy to make choices about their lives, that people have the tools they need to plan their families in a safe and healthy way, that it is affordable, that it is accessible, that people have access to abortion care if they need it. And it all just exploded. And I have never looked back. I cannot imagine working in a different field as stressful as working in uh sexual and reproductive health can be and fighting for abortion. And, you know, there are days where I will joke about quitting to start a bakery bookstore, but I just can't imagine not being in this fight. And as much as you can feel bruised and battered and think we're never going to win, I know deep down that we are going to win. And this is a fight that we are gonna win, and it is worth fighting, and I cannot imagine doing something else, working with different people. This movement is so amazing with so many, and I am so blessed and lucky to get to talk to as many of them as I have or will over the course of this podcast, and that gives me so much joy and hope, and I love doing this, and I love bringing their stories to you, bringing their fight to you, and having an audience who is so interested in these issues we talk about and wants to find ways to get involved. I just feel very lucky to have grown this community and the community around me of advocates that I am in the trenches with day in and day out. And all of that goes back to having sex ed from a nun and a mom who sat me down and gave me the autonomy to make my own choices about whether to go to a protest at a Planned Parenthood. But without those, I don't know that I would be here right now, even though it's not a straight line or a clear line. That is how I got to this point. And I am just so grateful for all of you for listening and for everybody who has come on the podcast to talk to me about these issues that we all care so, so much about. So thank you, and thank you to our audience and to my guests, and I hope you enjoyed this year's sexual and reproductive health origin stories episodes. Okay, y'all. I hope you enjoyed everybody's stories. I always love getting to hear how everybody came to this work. It is so much fun. And then I will just flag that we are off next week, but we will be back with a new episode in the new year. So I hope everybody has a wonderful holiday season and we'll see you next year. If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at Jenny, J-E-N-N-I-E at Reprospite Back.com, or you can find us on social media. We're at Reprospite Back on Facebook and Twitter, or Repros FB on Instagram. If you love our podcast and want to make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, or if you want to make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at ReprosfightBack.com. Thanks all.