Episode 15: In this episode, we’re joined by Our Justice to discuss abortion access and reproductive justice in Minnesota.
Guests: Megumi Rierson, Shayla Walker
Yoko Vue: Hello everyone, welcome back to New Narratives: dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. My name is Yoko Vue and I’m the Storyteller Intern for Asian American Organizing Project.
Siena Iwasaki Milbauer: And I’m Siena Iwasaki Milbauer, I use she/her pronouns, and I’m the Content Creator Intern for Asian American Organizing Project. I’m excited to be here to co-host a special pair of New Narratives episodes about a topic that has always been intensely relevant to our Minnesotan Asian communities, but perhaps even more so recently: reproductive justice.
Yoko: The term reproductive justice was first coined in 1994 by a group of Black women in Chicago named Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice. According to Sister Song, “Rooted in the internationally-accepted human rights framework created by the United Nations, Reproductive Justice combines reproductive rights and social justice. The progenitors of RJ launched the movement by publishing a historic full-page statement with 800+ signatures in The Washington Post and Roll Call.”
Siena: On today’s episode, we’re talking with Our Justice’s Shayla Walker and Megumi Rierson. Our Justice is a Minnesota-based abortion fund that provides financial and logistical support for folks seeking an abortion. The organization has also been a plaintiff in a number of significant abortion rights cases in Minnesota. This includes 1995’s Doe v. Gomez, which established a precedent of constitutional protection of abortion care in the state of Minnesota. Our Justice was also a plaintiff in a recent case which resulted in a Minnesota District Court ruling several Minnesota abortion restriction laws as unconstitutional, paving the way for better abortion care access in our state.
In our conversation, Shayla and Megumi share about the history and present state of abortion access in Minnesota, the importance of providing financial resources to make abortion care truly equitable, and what true reproductive justice would look like to them. Let’s dive in!
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Shayla Walker: My name is Shayla and all pronouns are fine with me. And I am the Executive Director of Our Justice. I’m Black and Dominican. I am a Gemini sun, Cancer moon, or excuse me Cancer rising in Taurus moon.
Megumi Rierson: My name is Megumi Rierson. I use she/her pronouns. I’m the Communications Director at Our Justice. I’m mixed Japanese and white. I got into this work, I’ve been realizing like seven or eight years ago now and I’m really excited to be here. Oh, I’m a Virgo sun and a Virgo rising and a Taurus Moon.
Yoko: Thank you. Well, since we’re sharing, I only remember that my sun is in Scorpio. Even though I’ve looked up multiple times about my rising and my moon.
Siena: Let me see if I can remember mine. I know that I’m my sun is in Taurus. I believe my moon is in Aquarius and I think I am a Scorpio rising but don’t quote me on that. So to kind of jump us off in the conversation Megumi you’ve touched on this a little bit. I just kind of wanted to start if each of you would share how you got involved in reproductive justice work and then specifically how you ended up in your role at Our Justice.
Megumi: I got into this work, like I said, seven or eight years ago. I started off as a phone, not a phone canvasser, a door canvasser for NAVAL Pro-choice Washington in Seattle. I sort of got an understanding for a lot of interconnected issues of how abortion access is a matter of legal restrictions and legislation, but also a material thing that people struggle to pay for, and that there can often be a disconnect between what people understand is the legal recognition of abortion access, and then what it’s actually like to, to access it because I was doing a lot of canvassing around Catholic hospital mergers and the way that sort of hospitals work and interact to either restrict or increase abortion access. And the place that I got introduced to the concept of reproductive justice as a whole was when I was a sex educator.
We did sex education, my supervisor and I did sex education through our local Planned Parenthood for a variety of community events, including, groups with parents, groups with parents and kids talking to having– or trying to foster healthy conversations about sex. But the thing that we did regularly was that we would go into the local juvenile detention center to do sex education lessons. And that was sort of the first time that the sort of confluence of all the life extinguishing systems that we work in that reproductive justice works to fight against became really clear to me that there was a bit of a dissonance between trying to teach kids about having healthy relationships to their bodies and to themselves when they were in jail, and having so much of their autonomy and rights taken away from them when they’re literally kids. Yeah. So that’s how I kind of came to like that specific grounding of reproductive justice and hopped around a lot of different jobs. I used to work in campaigns and for elected officials and sort of came back to my home in the repro and abortion movement, because, I don’t know, I just sort of felt called to which is a little corny, but that’s kind of the thing.
Shayla: So this is Shayla and I started in repro about 10 years ago. So I was fresh out of college and was looking for a job that you know a big girl job. And I saw this opening for a woman’s health advisor, I think that’s what it was called at the time, and it was for an independent abortion clinic in Minneapolis. I did an interview, I remember it like it was yesterday, I was at my job interviewing on my lunch break for this new job. And I got the job! I was so excited to start and when I got there, I was so overwhelmed by the amount of appointments that I saw. So this is before they had transitioned their record-keeping system over to the computer, it was all on paper. And I just remember, on my first day looking up at stacks and stacks of paper, they were like literally towering me, of people who were like getting abortion. And I was really intimidated because I remember in high school, we would have conversations about abortion here and there. And somebody said to me, “Oh abortion is not that common. A lot of people don’t have it. It’s not that big of an issue. It’s just a wedge issue that people talk about.” For some reason. I don’t know why I believe this random man in high school, I believed him. And I was like, yeah, that’s, that’s right. But when I got to my job, I saw all these all these forms, all these requests forms for appointments. And I’m like, that man was very misinformed.
So I was intimidated, I almost quit. And my mom was like, “Shayla, just give it a chance.” And from there, I stayed a week, and I was introduced to some of the closest people that I hold dear to me now. And they taught me about reproductive justice. They showed me the Sister Song video. We started organizations and clubs together for women of color to start talking about reproductive justice issues in Minnesota through storytelling and through art. And yeah I found my political hole for a long time, I was organizing around race issues, since I was in high school. And when I found reproductive justice, that was the first time where I was able to organize around multiple facets of my identity. So it felt really good. I often say our reproductive justice should be everybody’s political home because it is the home of intersectionality. After working at the clinic, for about seven, eight years, then I transitioned to work at Our Justice. And I became the ED earlier this year. And it feels like I’ve been working here for such a long time, but I’ve had the best time leading in the space and leading with Megumi who’s like frickin brilliant. And Leah, also brilliant mind and it feels really good to be able to lead alongside these two people and create a powerful movement for reproductive justice in Minnesota and specifically in the Twin Cities, something that I feel a lot of people have been craving for a long time and it is also meeting the moment.
Yoko: Yeah, thank you so much for that. I love learning about folks, where they come from and their journeys and how intersectional often things are in the different justices and different fights that we are going through and Shayla as you’re talking about Our Justice, can either of you talk about what the role of Our Justice is in the fight of reproductive rights in Minnesota? And in addition to that, what is Our Justice currently working on?
Shayla: I’m gonna let Megumi take that because I feel like Megumi has been leading a lot of the significant work that we’re doing now. I feel like I could talk to the work that we’ve been doing in the past but I want to look forward and so I’m gonna let Megumi take that.
Megumi: Thanks Shayla. I will say, Shayla, though is the expert on the fund. So the role of Our Justice in the fight for reproductive rights and justice in Minnesota. For those who don’t know, I don’t know in your audience, we’re an abortion fund and a reproductive justice organization. So our primary programming is to directly fund people’s abortions and get them as many of the resources as we have the capacity to provide, to make it as easy as possible, get abortion care. We are a small organization and the number of barriers to abortion are much bigger than us. But we see our role as kind of closing the gap between the legal right to abortion and the reality of accessing it. So abortion is legal in Minnesota, it has remained legal since Roe v. Wade was struck down. However, since long before Roe v. Wade was struck down, there were all kinds of barriers to accessing abortion care, and mainly the ones that we were addressing were cost and travel, and to a degree societal abortion stigma that sort of underpins all of the material barriers. So we are continuing as since the decision to provide a pledge of financial support to anyone who is getting an abortion within our service area, at any of the clinics in Minnesota, any Minnesota resident traveling outside to a different legal state, and also one independent clinic in Iowa.
What we’re working on right now is, I would say, pushing us as a state and as a movement in Minnesota beyond just legal recognition and sort of verbal acknowledgment of abortion care, because as we’ve seen, it is simply not enough to say that a community of personalized official is pro-abortion or pro-choice, because really what makes the difference between someone actually being able to access it is like having the resources to do so. And that’s why we operate so firmly from a reproductive justice framework, because the material conditions that create a community where abortion is safe, legal, and ideally free, those are the same conditions that are gonna create a safe community across all movements. So we don’t have full reproductive justice, we don’t live in a safe and thriving community. If there’s not clean water, there’s not safe housin, people don’t have fair and equitable wages. If people are still afraid of police violence, like all of these factors come together to create a world where everyone gets to access the care they need and be able to do whatever they want with their bodies.
So what we’re working on right now is, concretely, we are seeking municipal funding at the at the city level from the City of Minneapolis. We’re hoping to secure funds in the city budget to directly fund abortion care, which is something that lots of cities across the country have done. And sort of represents a new model and way of engaging in abortion access because I think for a long time, there’s been a real hesitation to put resources behind abortion care. Politicians and elected officials are much more comfortable saying that they support abortion in theory, but not actually engaging with the issue itself and that’s for a number of reasons. But one of them is chiefly because the people who struggled to access abortion care are Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, poor people, queer and trans people, all types of communities that our power structures and governments are usually used to ignoring and marginalizing, but not today. We’re working on that. and we’re also hoping to in the next couple of months relaunch our abortion support group or post-abortion support group for folks to have a sort of peer-led community space around accessing abortion, what it was like to access abortion and all this complicated feelings that come up around that, because for so many people, they experience every kind of emotion you could possibly experience. But often there’s only room to experience super positive or super negative and that’s not the case. That’s kind of what we’re working on in the future. And I don’t know if Shyala wants to talk a little bit more about what we’re seeing in the fund in our services.
Shayla: Yeah, with the fund. We are seeing that people are just needing money for their abortion and the fund can only support as much as we have. So we’re needing more people to donate. I’m gonna put a plug out there; donate to ourjustice(dot)net. Yeah, so we’re seeing people needing larger amounts. And that has been a trend since COVID. Before COVID people would need like $100 or they need $200 and they could figure out the rest. They could work a couple of extra hours at work or they could reach out to a friend or a family member to borrow some money. But that is not the case anymore. For a lot of folks, they maybe don’t have work or maybe their support system and their communities that they used to lean on before are already tapped out. So they’re meeting a lot larger portions of funding, than what we traditionally were passing out in the past. So our goal, hopefully, is to make sure that we are able to fundraise. That will lead to meet so many people who are coming to Minnesota and people who are in Minnesota who already have insurance, and their insurance doesn’t pay for their abortion, but also just to fund them in a way that is really meaningful. So instead of the $150 or $200, pledges to bring it up to $400 and $500 pledges because first-trimester abortion in clinic is around– I want to say between seven to $800. Like when I started back in 2013, it was closer to $550, but now I’ve seen trends going up $700, $800. And that’s just for first trimester. Another thing that we’re working on is doing some advocacy in the state around reimbursement rates. So we have Medicaid in Minnesota, thanks to Our Justice and Doe v. Gomez.
Doe v. Gomes is a case that we had with, that we were plaintiffs in back in 1995 and we won. And that established in the state constitution, the Minnesota Constitution that the state can’t uphold one pregnancy outcome over the other, meaning the same way that Medicaid has to pay for a birth is the same way that Medicaid has to pay for an abortion or miscarriage. So we had the foresight to be part of that litigation back in 1995. So that we could have that in the state of Minnesota. However, though, we have Medicaid that pays for abortion, we don’t have a lot of providers taking Medicaid, because Medicaid reimbursements are so low. So even if a provider did an abortion, and the abortion, it was a cash price of $2,000 or $800, or $3,000. Medicaid pays them the same amount and I believe it’s less than $400. So clinics are not able to stay afloat with that. So they, of course not gonna see Medicaid patients, but who are Medicaid patients? Folks who are again, like Megumi said, been ignored by the state, Black folks, Indigenous folks, disabled folks, queer folks. Those folks are going to have less access to care, just because of the state not try to reimburse clinics in a way that is meaningful.
Siena: Sort of provide some context to this conversation in the current situation that we’re in, in terms of the fight for reproductive justice. Could one or both of you talk about some of the big moments in the history of abortion and reproductive justice in Minnesota including but not limited to the recent fall of Roe and how that affects the landscape?
Megumi: Shayla already touched on this really well with mentioning Doe v. Gomez. So maybe we can start from there. I mean, abortions have been happening in Minnesota and the abortion movement has been happening in Minnesota long before Doe v. Gomez, but I think relevant to where we’re at right now is 1995. Our Justice was the plaintiff in a lawsuit called Doe v. Gomez, which sued the state of Minnesota for I believe Shayla not covering abortion care in its state-run Medicaid. And this lawsuit ended up establishing the strong constitutional protections that we have for abortion care in Minnesota now. And that’s what Shayla was talking about. The specific decision says that any state-administered program, whether that’s Medicaid or something like a state grant cannot privilege one birth outcome over the other and that has been interpreted through a good amount of case law to me and that Minnesota has stronger constitutional protections for abortion than the federal constitution, which is why when Roe fell abortion has remained legal in Minnesota.
Recently, our Justice filed another lawsuit under the Minnesota State Constitution to repeal a number of state-level abortion restrictions that we believe and a judge also believed violated the decision of Doe v. Gomez. So essentially, we had already done the work in 1995 to ensure that restrictions on abortion, like the ones that were just struck down, weren’t in place and yet they continue to be passed. And the dozen or so restrictions that were repealed, represented a portion of the hundreds of restrictions that were introduced in state in the state legislature since Doe v. Gomez. So I think the existence of those state restrictions and what Shayla was talking about with these Medicaid reimbursements, it represents a large system of incentives that actively disincentivize both providers from providing abortion care and patients from accessing it. So it’s sort of meaningless if there’s a legal recognition of abortion care when there’s all of these systems and incentives that make it really difficult to both provide and access.
But that does lead us to the fact that we did get a recent a really big win recently in our lawsuit. A state court recently struck down a number of the restrictions that we were challenging including a 24-hour waiting period for all patients that included a state-mandated script to be read to patients that included both medically irrelevant and inaccurate information. It was a script written by anti-abortion lawmakers just to sort of create another delay in getting abortion care. The two-parent notification for minors was struck down, that was a really big win as well, because minors who wanted to access abortion care would have to notify both of their parents regardless of their relationship, regardless of the safety of doing that. And if they couldn’t do that, they would have to go in front of a judge and have a judge decide whether or not they were mature or responsible or worthy enough to get an abortion.
The ban on advanced practice clinicians providing abortion care was struck down, which means that advanced nurse practitioners can provide abortion care, which is really important because there’s a serious shortage of abortion providers, especially right now. There’s not enough abortion providers to meet the need and that’s just been a fact for quite a while. And then felony penalties for abortion providers were also struck down, which was a unique targeting of abortion providers, obviously to make it not only not financially feasible to do their job, but also like scary and criminally scary to do their job. That’s kind of– those are some really important parts of the history that I think have gotten this here. And it’s also like, we take every victory in the courts as a win and also another step forward, because we know that the courts and the law are not going to ultimately have the final say on meaningful access for everyone.
Shayla: I just want to add to that, too what Megumi have said about these laws that were been introduced after we had already done the work. It wasn’t just specifically done in Minnesota, this was a national strategy that has been happening across states, what they call trap laws have been introduced. And there have been hundreds of them introduced for a number of years. And what they essentially do is, like Megumi said, prevent people from getting access to abortion care. If the laws or the trap laws are passed and the providers are not able to meet the new standards that are irrelevant to the care that they’re providing, then they have to close down. And it’s not like the clinics closed down and then fund, a small volunteer-led fund or a small three-person fund takes the state to court and then wins. This is a very unique thing that happened in Minnesota.
Like across the nation, this hasn’t been happening where funds can go to court and then win big like we have and then clinics start opening back up again. Because once a clinic closes, it’s hard for a clinic to reopen. And that’s what we’ve seen in Texas before 2013. There was a plethora of clinics in Texas. By the time that I left my job at the independent abortion clinic that I was working at, I think there was about maybe 10 of clinics in Texas, left, if that. So that just goes to say, even if the laws are overturned, even if we get big wins, there is still a hit to access that is really hard to recover from. And that will take, I don’t know it could take years to recover from I don’t know when Mississippi is going to get another clinic. I don’t know when Missouri is going to be able to open up another clinic, should things change in their state. So it’s very important to do the work on the front end and be on offense.
Yoko: Right. Yeah, definitely all great points. And as Megumi has already brought up about the abortion restrictions being ruled unconstitutional, I want to know where do we go from here. What are the next steps for us in Minnesota?
Megumi: Fund abortion. Like if it’s so important for people to say that this is a haven state, that this is a place where everyone can be safe and get an abortion, if it’s so important for elected officials to say that we’re not going to prosecute people for getting an abortion here and that we support abortion in xyz ways, the most meaningful way to impact abortion access is to pay for abortion care, to make it easy to access abortion care. Just because it’s legal, it does not mean it’s easy or accessible or just at all. Making abortion legal doesn’t change the fact that most people in this country cannot afford a $500 emergency expense. And it’s actually, more and more It’s like not going to be a $500 emergency expense can be closer to $1,000. Because you need a plane ticket, you need childcare, you need a place to stay, you need to eat out for all the nights that you’re gone, you’re going to lose your wages. There’s so many ways that accessing abortion, the reality of accessing abortion reveals the inequities in our system of classism, racism, sexism, all of these things all come together when we think about accessing abortion care. So if it’s important for people to live in a place where abortion is legal and not criminalized, it’s important for them to put resources behind it.
Shayla: Yeah, like Megumi we said fund abortion. The folks on power, what they need to do is make sure that these insurance companies include abortion care, as part of their plans. The majority of the people that we serve, have insurance. They have insurance, and they still cannot afford their abortions and insurance companies are not covering their abortion. Why do we have in Minnesota where you can get insurance through… What is it? What’s that plan called? Is it the… the exchange, the exchange.
Megumi: Oh the exchanges? Yeah.
Shayla: The exchange. So people can get their plan through the exchange, but none of the plans on the exchange has abortion coverage, that should not be a thing. So yeah, fund abortions, pay for people’s abortions. Make sure you’re voting for politicians who are funding– or making sure that people are getting childcare funded, making sure that they have transportation to get to and from their appointments, making sure that folks are able to take time off of work and still get paid. Because how are you going to go to work and you need health care, you’re gonna get penalized for accessing health care. That’s– it just doesn’t make sense. And so, yeah, fund abortions.
Siena: As you sort of noted in the past answer, there’s this context, right now where Minnesota is becoming framed as a haven state, right? So in the Midwest, it’s one of the few states where the right to access abortion is very well protected and there will be states surrounding us where folks may need to come to Minnesota to access abortion. So my question is, what is that going to look like? How is that going to affect the abortion access system that we have in place in Minnesota to be accepting all of these patients that need care? And also what is sort of the ratio of providers and resources that we have for abortion in Minnesota versus the need that is going to exist?
Shayla: I would say the ratio is changing. Right now we’re in flux. And like Megumi said, there was never enough abortion providers to begin with. But since we had this win and advanced practitioners can now offer abortion care, I think going forward, we are going to see a growth in the practitioners that we have in Minnesota. Also, there are only about five providers that can train all these practitioners. So the growth is not going to happen immediately. It’s going to be something that is going to take time. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is we’ve already been accepting people from other states, we’ve been serving people from Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, even. So I think that again, that’s going to be a slow trickle in because only the people who can find childcare, who can take off time from work, who can get a ride, find transportation. Those are the folks who are going to be able to travel and how many people can just like find out they’re pregnant? Know, like, oh my gosh, I’m 12 weeks or eight weeks or 15 weeks and know like okay, I have this much time because abortion is a time sensitive matter. To get here get to from one state to another, I have this much time to fundraise this much money for my abortion. Like that’s not going to be everybody. A lot of people are not going to be able to travel. And I think that’s one thing that we don’t talk about enough. Yes, we’re gonna have a lot of people coming to Minnesota for care, but there’s also the fact that a lot of people are not going to be able to travel you we’re gonna still have to support them in some ways.
Megumi: I think that Shayla hit on the important points. I mean, already we have heard from every provider in the state that they’re overwhelmed that they’ve seen a massive increase in people coming in. I think the big trends are a huge increase in patients coming in, a huge increase in patients coming from out of state and people who live in the communities where these brick and mortar clinics are being unable to get appointments because clinics are booked up. Which means that appointments will then get delayed, or people will have their appointments delayed, which makes their appointments more expensive, or they just won’t seek abortion care at all. And that’s all by design, right. So if there is not– there is a national strategy to ultimately outlaw abortion at the federal level. But because the anti-abortion movement has been unable to do that effectively because of all these different state-level restrictions and laws, they are working very hard to make it as inaccessible as possible, to put as many barriers as possible. So putting in a bunch of state-level restrictions that like under resource funds have to like spend money and time on litigation to repeal or making abortion financially not feasible for clinics to provide, just putting so many steps in the way that like, people are just going to hopefully, in their eyes, hopefully they say it’s not worth it to me. Like abortion isn’t a real choice for me because it’s too expensive. It’s too far, it’s all of these things.
Because I think what we don’t quite focus on enough is that the correct number of abortion providers is one in every single community in every single state, so that every single person can get it within 24 hours of when they need it, because it’s actually so violent, to be forced to be pregnant a day longer than you want to be. Like forced pregnancy and forced birth is deeply violent and that’s something that gets taken for granted a lot. You know, the idea that abortion is legal in some states, so you can just go and travel somewhere as if that’s not like a huge disruption in your life. There’s just so many ways that like the people who are accessing abortion are undervalued, and their time is taken for granted. And their resources are taken for granted. And also, there’s just a complete, often lack of understanding of how hard it actually is and how– yeah, you can just travel to another state to get your abortion but would you want to travel? Like get on a three to six hour plane ride to have to like, I don’t know, get your root canal or something because it was so restricted in your state. But because it’s abortion, it’s highly stigmatized, and people who get abortions are highly stigmatized. People think that that’s like an okay amount of work to do.
Yoko: Yeah and as we’re talking about abortion restrictions, and you’ve already mentioned a bit about this with Medicaid; can you do talk about the specific and unique impacts of abortion restrictions on people of color?
Megumi: The people who have, who have always struggled to have full autonomy and to experience full bodily autonomy and full safety, and accessibility in their reproductive choices, I mean since the founding of this country, it has always been Black and Indigenous people. And it’s also been every person of color, every person who is queer, trans, disabled, doesn’t speak English. If you do not meet a very specific image of a rich white and able-bodied person in America, then there are all sorts of ways that, consciously and unconsciously, you’re assumed to be less deserving of care, of basic health care. And that shows up in how Medicaid coverage in Minnesota is intended for poor people and has pretty abysmal coverage, often, especially for abortion care. That shows up in the fact that like, lots of queer and trans people don’t want to go to a brick-and-mortar clinic to get an abortion because they’re going to be misgendered or they’re gonna have really like gross and basic questions asked about their sex life and their choices, their gender, their anatomy. That’s the baseline of like, just existing as a person who is not cis and straight and white. But if you add on top of it, the fact that abortion is so highly stigmatized and many people have very pernicious racialized and gendered assumptions and classist assumptions about who accesses abortion care. It often just puts the procedure out of reach for people and or if people do access abortion care, it’s a big contributing factor to like why people don’t want to talk about it.
Siena: In a very similar vein, I was wondering if you could maybe elaborate a bit more on how abortion restrictions have specifically impacted the queer and trans community. And I’m also thinking a little bit about the rhetoric, and particularly in recent years and months, and the ways in which a lot of political conversations, at least that I’ve seen around abortion access have included a lot of anti-trans, anti-queer violence and just the way that things are framed. So I was wondering if one or both of you could speak more on that.
Megumi: I think that you Siena you brought up something that we talked about a lot, and we work on a lot. In the past a couple of years, and I’ve been working in the abortion rights and justice space, I’ve seen a lot more conversation about how abortion is basic health care that people of all genders access, and it’s basic health care that impacts everyone, no matter if you’re the person that’s accessing it or not. There’s still a lot of work to do to make sure that it’s not just that people need to say, “people who access abortion care” instead of “women who access abortion care.” Or “people who can get pregnant” instead of “pregnant women.” I am hoping to see a more real grounded political understanding that when everyone is able to access abortion care and not be afraid of being misgendered, or experiencing homophobic or transphobic language in the doctor’s office, like that is a good in itself. It’s not so much about switching the language because it’s the politically correct thing to do. But it’s actually important to switch the language and also change the experience that queer and trans people have when accessing care, because that is just like a more right and just world to live in. Ideally, if you have an abortion clinic that is providing gender affirming care, and isn’t using super gendered or homophobic language, and understands that abortion is something that everyone can access, then ideally you probably also live in a community that centers those values as well. And that’s just good and that just shouldn’t be the case. So I think it’s twofold. It is important to be saying that all people need to access abortion care, all people are impacted by the ability to access abortion care, but it’s also meaningful that it’s a material change, as well.
Yoko: So we’re kind of coming to our last few questions here. I wanted to know, what are your hopes for the future of reproductive justice in Minnesota and the United States as a whole as well?
Megumi: I want to see all of it to be safe and legal and free. Maybe if Shayla is able to speak on this later, we have done a lot of visioning and talking within Our Justice about what our vision of reproductive justice looks like. And often among staff and board, it’s some sort of vision of play; all of us are sitting in a park, and some people have brought their kids and they’re playing with the kids over there and someone is coming back from their appointment at the free clinic and someone is coordinating who’s doing the childcare for tomorrow, and someone brought a really beautiful spread of food and someone’s coordinating, like, oh, yeah, I can take off work tomorrow, because I can get you to your abortion appointment that you won’t have to pay for. And we sort of dream about it in this very, one day, we’ll all be able to hang out and not worry. Because everyone’s childcare, everyone’s pregnancies, everyone’s abortion, it’s all going to be free and easy. and not scary. Because we obviously work in the dispensation of services and resources, but also we also work in the space of like we want this to feel easy for you. There’s so much that’s going against that that’s making it feel difficult, but we want this to feel as easy as possible because it should.
Shayla: Yeah, it’s interesting, because when we start talking about what we dream up in the future, it’s not just like, “oh, we want folks to have access to abortion care.” Yes, we do and reproductive justice is so much more than that like Megumi said. When we were dreaming, I was thinking about people being able to go to their garden and exchange food for childcare or have their neighbor drop them off at an appointment, and it’s not going to be such a burden that they’re going to miss work. That’s not going to make it so they are not able to pay their light bills or they’re going to be short on rent. It’s not going to be a burden. People’s basic needs are going to be taken care of. There’s going to be clean water, clean air, fresh food. So reproductive justice really is more than just accessing abortion care. It’s what are the conditions that are needed to live a safe and carefree life. We are dreamy people if you couldn’t tell by our intros.
Siena: Before we properly wrap up the interview, I just wanted to create space to say if there’s anything else that either of you would like to add, anything that we didn’t ask about that you feel like it’s important to be included in the conversation.
Shayla: I would just say, say the word abortion, it’s not a dirty word. I always encouraged people to say it, because there’s so much stigma. At the end of the day, even if we have all the money to pay for all the abortions, even if we have all the laws that we want, we still have to work to change the mindset of people who think that taking care of yourself, being compassionate to others and taking care of them is something that’s bad, something that’s horrible. No, it’s not, it’s health care. Abortion is health care. And we need to be able to just say the word and accept that people have a range of different feelings when it comes to their own abortions. And they’re not any good abortions or bad abortions, they’re just abortions that people have and we all love someone who’s had an abortion.
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Siena: That’s all for today’s conversation! Stay tuned for episode two of our reproductive justice series, when we sit down with folks from the Minnesota Chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, also known as NAPAWF Minnesota, to talk about advocating for reproductive justice as AAPI individuals and communities.
Yoko: This episode is written, edited, and produced by your host Yoko Vue, Storyteller Intern at Asian American Organizing Project, with help from special co-host Siena Iwasaki Milbauer, Content Creator Intern. More information about AAOP can be found at our website aaopmn.org. Thank you for listening and see you next time!
Music by AudioCoffee from Pixabay