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(03/21/18 8:43pm)
A group of students and faculty met in Hillcrest for an Planned Parenthood Action Forum, hosted by Feminist Action at Middlebury (FAM) on March 8. The forum was led by Paige Feeser, who serves as the Vermont Public Affairs Organizer for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and representative organizer for Planned Parenthood Vermont Action Fund.
Feeser began her talk with an overview of Planned Parenthood’s story, specifically discussing the organization in the aftermath 2016 election. She said that Republican congressional leaders moved to strip Planned Parenthood of all federal funding in Jan. 2017 in an attempt to fulfill their long time goal of eliminating abortion services. With then-president-elect about to take office, Republicans had taken quick actions to try to move their plan forward.
Federal defunding of Planned Parenthood would inhibit the two-and-a-half million patients who rely on the organization from accessing their healthcare services. Feeser said they were also working to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and block Planned Parenthood from accepting Medicaid reimbursements.
“So basically if a patient comes to us wanting to use Medicaid to pay for their services, we would no longer be able to accept that form of payment.”
Such an action would have had disastrous consequences in a state like Vermont where, according to Feeser, 47 percent of the Planned Parenthood patient base access services using Medicaid funding. “So we knew we were up for the fight of our lives,” she said.
To prevent this, Planned Parenthood worked to identify senators following the inauguration whom they could persuade to take action, among these were Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska senator and Susan Collins, the Maine senator. Volunteers wrote, called, and sought both out in public.
A total of 200,000 volunteers across the country assisted and organized Planned Parenthood events fighting to prevent Medicaid defunding and ACA repeal. Volunteers organized half of the 2400 events, made 250,000 phone calls, and signed 2.5 million petitions.
Collins’s and Murkowski’s votes against Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s July 2017 proposal to partially repeal the ACA, as well as Senator John McCain’s dissenting vote, helped bring down the amendment.
“What an epic, epic time, but we won! We won! We won our first major battle,” Feeser said. “And one of the major things to really emphasize here, is that we can think of the brand, but most importantly what made this most successful was our people.”
With a slide titled “The Urgency of Now,” Feeser moved on to talk about Planned Parenthood in 2018. She explained that because of the special elections that take place in states like Virginia and Alabama, more senators support Planned Parenthood now than in Jan. 2017.
“This helps us potentially avoid another vote against the Affordable Care Act and also entitlement reform,” she said.
At the beginning of 2018, Paul Ryan vocalized plans to implement entitlement program reforms, which would mean deep cuts to Medicaid, Social Security and the ACA. Planned Parenthood has been preparing for attacks on these programs.
When Feeser asked who in the group knew what Title X entailed, only a few people raised their hands.
“This is what they want to have happen,” she said. “They want people to not be educated about how access to birth control and reproductive health is funded.”
Title X is the federal family planning program that provides funding to Planned Parenthood, allowing the organization to provide services to its patients on a sliding pay scale. It includes access to birth control, STI/STD testing and treatment and pregnancy testing. It does not include abortion services.
In February, the Trump administration said it would create new standards on how it would generate money for people who apply for Title X funding. The administration is aiming to provide preferential treatment to providers that promote abstinence-only, natural rhythm method, homeopathic birth control and other related services. This move would potentially exclude providers of more specialized birth control methods like the IUD and Nexplanon, which are 99 percent effective.
“This is the fight that we’ll most likely be fighting this summer,” Feeser said.
Feeser began the forum on a local level, asking the group one thing they would like to change on campus. At the end of the forum, Feeser addressed the group directly and called for a plan of action on a campus level.
“It was really meaningful to hear all the great ideas everyone had,” FAM co-president Cara Eisenstein ’18 said. “We are writing an Op-ed to the Campus about the #Fight4BirthControl campaign we will soon be launching on campus, where our long term goal is to have Middlebury’s administration make a public statement affirming their continued support for including no-cost contraceptives as part of the health insurance plan.”
FAM will petition for this campaign in the library the week after spring break. The club will create a go/link at its meeting on Tuesday from 8-9 p.m. in the Chellis House that will be a resource for information on the sexual and reproductive health services available through the college and in town.
This forum was another installment in the Generation Action initiative, which FAM reestablished this fall with a forum led by Feeser.
(11/09/17 12:26am)
A small group of students met in Chellis House for a information session on Planned Parenthood on Oct. 19. Paige Feeser, the Vermont Public Affairs Organizer for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, led the session. Feminist Action at Middlebury (FAM) hosted the event, reestablishing the Generation Action initiative, the collegiate activist branch of Planned Parenthood.
Feeser welcomed the group and, arranging the seats in a circle, shared her own experience working with Planned Parenthood. She admitted that she did not initially feel the same passion for the organization as her colleagues until the Supreme Court struck down the Massachusetts “buffer zone” law in June 2014, siding with abortion opponents.
“I really for the first time saw this systemic oppression that is happening in that our country does not fully support women and the choices that they make about their own bodies,” Feeser said. “It was from there that I said I can’t stand idle.“
Feeser then launched into discussion, stating that she wanted to give the group a basic understanding of Planned Parenthood so that they could understand the organization on both a national and local level when talking to other people on campus. She explained that there are three important elements to the organization, the first being healthcare.
“We are a trusted healthcare provider, and in fact we’ve been providing healthcare for over a hundred years,” Feeser said. “We provide a wealth of different services, including abortion, but really our focus is both reproductive and sexual health.”
The second element is education.
“We truly believe that all people should be able to make voluntary choices about their health,” she said. “So we’re providing education during people’s appointments, during counseling sessions, we are providing 24/7 up-to-date information on our website.” Feeser also discussed Planned Parenthood’s peer educator program, which offers high school students sexual education training that they can then use to teach their fellow students.
The third element is advocacy, which is a critical piece in ensuring that people have access to healthcare and education services.
“Our mission statement is to provide, promote, and protect access to reproductive healthcare and sexuality education so that all people can make voluntary choices about their healthcare,” Feeser said.
Feeser also gave a few of Planned Parenthood’s northern New England statistics.
“We have 21 health centers across Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Last year we served 41,956 patients,” she said. “The majority of our patients are in their 20s, and that is interesting because it challenges what most people think, that people who use our services the most are in their teens.”
There are many other misconceptions about the organization. For example many people assume that patients only go to Planned Parenthood in times of crisis, such as an unplanned pregnancy or STI. But Feeser repeated that the organization offers many different services.
“[In the Northern New England branch], abortion care is at six percent, five percent pregnancy testing and five percent other counseling,” she said. “[Health care for transgender individuals] is a service that is up and coming in our health centers, as well as lab-testing.” She also mentioned other services, such as birth control, cancer screenings for both males and females, preconception education, STD preventatives and men’s health care, including erectile dysfunction treatment.
Feeser mentioned another myth about who uses services at Planned Parenthood. 87 percent of patients in Northern New England are women and 13 percent are men.
“Even amongst our supporters I hear all the time, ‘Planned Parenthood is a women’s organization.’ We’re trying to break that and certainly we are really working to bring more males into our health center, and really putting a focus on LGBT care as well,” Feeser said.
Feeser then turned the discussion back to the students and discussed sexual education and awareness in a school environment, a topic that the student organizations have been taking on recently. Natalie Cheung ’18, who attended the session, is working with other students to start a sexual education initiative on campus, but the students who attended Feeser’s talk felt that people should receive sex education before college.
FAM president Cara Eisenstein ’18 acknowledged that there are already sex-positive education organizations on campus, but she thinks that increasing this number is important.
“I think it’s great that there are a couple of different organizations doing similar and somewhat overlapping things, but with a different main focus, because that way the labor can be divided,” she said. She also mentioned that FAM and a few other organizations and individuals are working to bring a sex educator from O.School, an online sexual education platform, to campus in early December.
Eisenstein has also been working with Feeser on Planned Parenthood advocacy for the past few months.
“I think that as someone from Vermont who is relatively young, Paige is a great window into Planned Parenthood for students at Middlebury [who are interested in being] part of Generation Action,” she said. “I’m really glad we were able to reinstitute Generation Action on campus because it is an important organization for helping young people get involved in the fight for reproductive justice and focusing on advancing the goals of feminism through an intersectional lens.”
FAM is incorporating Generation Action into its meetings every Wednesday from 9-10 p.m. in the Chellis House. The club plans to have a tabling event in Proctor within the next few weeks in order to draw attention to current events surrounding reproductive justice.
(10/05/17 12:06am)
Students and faculty gathered to listen to the dialogue between Katha Pollitt and Janell Hobson in an event titled “What Can Feminism Speak To?” in Wilson Hall on Wednesday, Sept. 27. The lecture presented the topic of intersectional feminism and the realm of womanhood throughout all aspects of life.
The event, which included a lunch with Pollitt and several students the following day, was sponsored by the president’s office, the feminist studies department and the Chellis House.
Pollitt is a feminist critic and writer of the column “Subject to Debate” for The Nation. Hobson is an associate professor of sexuality at the University of Albany, State University of New York. The talk was hosted and moderated by Middlebury professor Laurie Essig. Throughout the talk, the women touched on intersectional feminism, the 2016 election and feminist celebrities.
Pollitt began the dialogue talking about how essentially everything affects women because women exist in every sphere of life. She mentioned that when she asked women what their preoccupations were, they gave answers such as race, health care, cyber security, Silicon Valley, LGBTQ rights, trans issues and reproductive justice.
On reproductive justice specifically, Pollitt stressed that choice is important, but not enough. She said that women need resources in order to raise children, and that therefore reproductive rights extend beyond pregnancy into motherhood.
“This aspect is not mentioned enough,” Pollitt said, adding that class is often a factor. “Choice is hampered if a woman is poor.” She also pointed out the inherent imbalance in who is responsible for family planning. “Why is it women’s jobs to fix everything?” she said. “I’m still waiting for that big march where men march for birth control for men.”
Hobson agreed with Pollitt that most aspects of life have a gender component. However, she added that feminism should speak to the most marginalized, not just the mainstream. Feminism has traditionally focused on white, middle-class, straight women, making it an exclusive, and therefore hypocritical, advocacy for equality. Hobson added that this focus on white women has created a false competition between white women and men of color, which leaves women of color entirely out of the picture.
“If we start with women at the bottom, think of how all other women are implicated,” Hobson said. “When black women get free, every woman gets free.”
Hobson also talked about women and sexism in politics, touching on the fact that Huma Abedin, vice chair of Clinton’s 2016 campaign, blamed herself for Clinton’s loss because of a sexting scandal involving her now ex-husband, Anthony Wiener. Hobson related this incident to the public’s reaction to the Bill Clinton scandal, for which Hillary was criticized throughout her campaign, and for which Hillary is often still blamed.
Pollitt also expressed the importance of supporting Hillary in the election’s aftermath while the public, including President Trump, continues to attack her.
“I don’t even look at the question ‘if Hillary were a man would she have won?’” Pollitt said. Instead, she says she asks, “If Trump were a woman would he have won? If Trump were a black man would he have gotten anywhere? If Trump were anything but a white man?”
This liberal sentiment won cheers and applause from the audience. But one student, who identified as a woman and a Democrat, expressed a concern that Republican women were excluded from feminism in the current political climate that labels Trump supporters as sexist and misogynist.
“You have to be able to overlook a lot of what Donald Trump said about women in order to vote for him,” Pollitt said in response.
Commenting on the 53 percent of white women voters who voted for Trump, Hobson also discussed the distrust many women of color had of Hillary. “I need to think of what it means to distrust the white woman,” she said. “When we talk about power and privilege, we don’t expect Trump to support [women of color], but we don’t expect white women to, either.”
The two speakers also addressed pornography, sexism related to technology and celebrity feminism, speaking briefly of celebrities who shun feminism and those who embrace it. Hobson discussed Beyoncé, about whom she wrote a cover story about for Ms. Magazine in 2013. Hobson described her impression of Beyoncé’s feminism to be an evolution.
“When I wrote that piece, I was still unclear about how feminist she was,” she said. “But I didn’t have to defend her because six months later she released flawless.”
Students who attended to talk enjoyed the different perspectives on stage. “I liked that, despite their differing viewpoints on some issues, Janell and Katha were able to agree on the key ideals of feminism and why it’s so necessary,” said Taite Shomo ’20.5, who attended both the talk and lunch. “I think that it’s important given the current political climate to be talking about feminism and especially intersectional feminism, and that Janell Hobson’s point about helping out the most marginalized people really spoke to that.”
President Laurie L. Patton made a similar point in a school-wide email sent before the event.
“Katha Pollitt and Janell Hobson are leading feminist voices of their generations, but also write from different points of view,” Patton wrote.
The Office of the President will be sponsoring more critical conversations throughout the year in the hope of opening up discussion to various academic perspectives.