Day Two- Abortion Conference Reflection

There's so much I want to say about the conference as a whole, but I think I will leave that for another post, and concentrate on the second, and final day of the Abortion: The Unfinished Revolution conference.

It started as a bright and sunny day, and I stopped to take pictures of horses on my walk to UPEI.

I started my day listening to a panel called "Abortion Stigma" 
On the panel there was a Professor from Open University in England, A Professor from the University Ulster in Ireland who is also a researcher at Institute for Research in Social Sciences and a Counsellor from Vancouver B.C.

So much was talked about in this panel.  The stigma around teenage pregnancy and teenage abortion in the UK.  It seems as though teenagers are doomed either way, if they get pregnant they are stigmatized, if they have an abortion they are stigmatized, if they keep the baby they are stigmatized.  Some don't feel like they have any other option other than motherhood and some feel like they have no other option than abortion.  Neither of these scenarios represent a Pro-Choice or Reproductive Rights position.   The way abortion is stigmatized in Northern Ireland which has two heavily religious options as political parties.  Many people thought abortion was illegal in Northern Ireland until a private clinic opened up. The political opposition to the private clinic was astounding.  It reminded me of the "That doesn't happen here" mentality that PEI has.  It's kind of politicians grudgingly accepting and ignoring the fact it exists all at the same time.  Until they actually have to deal with it.  Although PEI covers the procedure cost in Halifax, and the NHS does not cover the procedure for people from Northern Ireland, despite them being UK citizens.  I feel like part of that is fear of federal backlash if PEI cut the funding altogether... and the federal government has made it clear they don't want to have to deal with anything abortion related.

The Counsellor from Vancouver offered a really interesting, hands on perspective.  There were a lot of race and class differences brought into her presentation, as Vancouver is a very diverse city.  One of the things I loved was her story about how the clinic used to be in a more suburban area, which got protested (while usually respecting B.C.'s buffer zone laws), and had someone buy the house next door and put up horrible signs and a tombstone in the front.  Eventually they moved to East Vancouver, an extremely busy, extremely diverse area.  It was hard for the protestors to protest without impeding the flow of traffic and they got yelled at a lot by people passing through.   It was clear their anti-choice attempts were not welcome in the community.   The counsellor made a really interesting observation, saying that for newcomers it was fairly clear that if they had grown up in countries where abortion was not stigmatized, they had no negative psychological reflections about having their abortion.  There were women who chose abortion because they had gotten married outside of wedlock and had a legitimate fear of being killed by their family for it.   I found it fascinating the different people who chose abortions that visit the clinic, and the different reasons they had for choosing abortion.   I think the only reason that's not acceptable is women who feel like they have no other option than to choose abortion.  That says more about our social services and community than anything else though.


For the discussion group I went back and forth multiple times and made my decision about 2 minutes before the group started, but I chose to attend Building Community: Bridging the Academic/Activist Divide.  Here I got to listen to fascinating people talk about why they were attending the conference.  Students, young activists, community activists, a Norwegian bureaucrat, an Irish professor, an Irish news producer,  a gynaecologist, I can't even remember what background everyone had, it was a good size group of over 20 people.  

After lunch I attended Challenging Discourses and Changing Conversations. On this panel there was a UPEI Professor, a UPEI graduate, an Artist, a Professor from Lakehead University in Ontario and a grad student... I think from the University of Ottawa, but I'm not completely sure.

This was one of my favourite panels.   All of the panels were interesting, and I enjoyed them all, but I am head over heels in love with this panel.   I think it was the diversity of it that spoke to me.
We talked about post abortion discourses and the idea of Post Abortion Syndrome, and how when a woman actually chooses abortion of her own free will, she almost never experiences regret. Regret comes from situations and experiences, but rarely the actual abortion itself.  If we change the language from "it's not welcome here" "that doesn't happen here" "good girls don't do that" to "it is a medical decision" and "it can be part of positive self growth" it will take away the stigma.  Some women feel bad because they think they're supposed to feel bad.  This resinated with me because  friend once told me she felt guilty about having an abortion, I asked her why and she said because she was supposed to.  When I asked her if she regretted having an abortion she said "Of course not.".  The two things didn't make sense to me... how can you feel guilty about something that you don't regret doing.  It didn't make sense to me at the time, and this presentation helped clarify it.

 The Artist presented the latest project she is working on, a beautiful work of art that she describes as "Access is an experimental documentary that is presented as a video installation on 4 wall mounted screens in a grid – each monitor has a head set that allows the audience to listen to the audio individually. Presented are the faces of women listening to their peers, neighbours, and community members expressing their opinions and thoughts on the topic “Access to female reproductive and sexual health facilities on Prince Edward Island.” This work attempts to shift the focus of activism from voicing to listening." I think a problem that arises in any work is the need to talk and sometimes shout to get our point across, and sometimes we forget to listen.  You can learn a lot from listening, the conference is an excellent example of that.  The Lakehead University professor spoke about abortion among the Blackfoot and how their medical knowledge has been suppressed by colonialism.   The grad student's presentation was a mix of funny and seriousness.  The Ryan Gosling slide won it for me (I go through "Hey Girl" studying slides around exam time all the time).  She spoke about masculinity, and how there's this push to emphasize a loss to men whose partners have had abortions.  It works to frame men as having fatherhood as the most important thing they can do, but also structures it as they are a failure if they do not have children.  Beyond the anti-choice rhetoric this attempts to promote, you are also telling men who are infertile that they are not men, or men that choose not to have children, that they are not men.  There was this HORRIBLE, racist, classist propaganda against abortion that a youth group made.  I can't find the picture on google.  The writing was "Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women" (or something along those lines).  They had large, dark black, dirty hands covering the mouth of a much paler woman.    URG.

The final session I attended was Material and Discursive: Spaces and Places
I was lucky enough to chair this panel, thanks to a friend deciding she would would prefer to strictly observe.

The presenter I had been waiting the whole conference to see spoke.  She is an Architect from New York State.  I think I was the most excited for her, because her work made me rethink a  lot of things.  Her project is looking at building welcoming fences and barriers in states without buffer zone laws (specifically for the last abortion clinic in Mississippi).  Coming from a province who, while not having an official buffer zone law outside of Toronto, kind of follows Toronto's lead when it comes to picketers harassing people accessing abortion, and a province that has private clinics, but also relies heavily on hospitals for abortions, then moving to a province that doesn't have abortion at all, what people have to go through to get into the actual clinic was never really on my radar.  I thought about how people had to get TO the clinic- transportation, accommodations, that kind of access, but walking up to the clinic kind of fell off my radar until I looked into her work.  I became pissed off... especially for US citizens.  They live in a country that makes them jump through hoops to access abortion, and then doesn't protect them once they've exercised their right.  I wondered how many people, in places where abortion was legal, opted for illegal or self abortion because they emotionally or psychologically could not handle being verbally assaulted by protestors who were allowed to approach them, to infringe upon their space.

The next person to speak is a Harvard graduate who is an Assistant Professor of Law and MacBain Chair in Health Law and Policy at Dalhousie University.   She spoke about the spaces in which abortion takes place, with a bit of an emphasis on medical abortion.  How the idea of back alleys has taken over and the "back alley" of providing access can be the internet, or a number written on a bathroom stall, the mail carrier that delivers the pills to your house.

The next presenter is a Wilfred Laurier University Graduate student.  She spoke about how complex the issue of abortion is, and how despite society trying to confine it to a specific box, there are a lot of different factors that influence the decision to have an abortion. She examined youth (under the age of 25) who lived in PEI and who had an abortion.   As soon as she started speaking it clicked in my brain "This is the research that I've seen flyers for on the back of bathroom stall doors at UPEI for the past year... almost two years".   The only flyers I have ever seen on the back of bathroom stall doors at UPEI are the ones looking for research subjects for this research, who to call if you are experience domestic violence, and a flyer for Yoga...

The last presenter is a Harvard Law School Professor of International Law, and Human Rights Law.
She spoke about International Law relating to abortion.  How there's nothing mandating that countries have access but how international courts have reprimanded and fined countries for not providing safe access. There are soft laws and precedent supporting safe access to abortion, and the UN Committee against Torture and Human Rights Committees both consider safe access to abortion an essential human right.

Our final speaker was Marlene Gerber Fried.  She gave an empowering speech talking about hope for the future, the important work, how far we've come, but she also addressed racial issues, how many people view abortion as a "white" issue, and how reproductive rights often gets attributed to Planned Parenthood in the USA, when in fact there were movements, predominately by Black women, long before white people ever started fighting.  She spoke about how if we're helping a movement because we feel guilty especially because of the race we are, we need to get the fuck out of the way and let someone who is fighting because it directly affects them take the lead.  She spoke of her own guilt in the pass, wanting to help with something because she felt it was important, but also felt guilty about it because she was white, and how people told her she pretty much needed to suck it up because there were more important things going on and they didn't have time to deal with her guilt.  Which I found fantastic.  We need to stop focusing on race, and focus on equality and bringing all women the same quality and high standards that all women deserve.

I am going to write a refection (much shorter... probably) about the conference as a whole in the next day or two.  I am so thankful to have been given the opportunity to attend.