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Shari Inniss-Grant, Fellow

My Take

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Undermine the Reproductive Health of Women of Color

Posted by Shari Inniss-Grant, Fellow | Posted on: March 28, 2013 at 10:47 am

Traveling on subways in NY, I often saw ads asking if a woman was “alone, scared, pregnant” and suggesting she call a Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) hotline for help. Spread throughout the city, these seemingly-innocuous English and Spanish ads often faded into the background—designed to capture your attention only if you, a friend, or family member needed help.

Since one in two pregnancies across the U.S. is unintended, women daily face a need for reproductive healthcare that might prompt them to call one of the 2,500 to 4000 CPCs located across the country. Unfortunately, instead of offering transparent, unbiased, comprehensive information that allows a woman to make her own informed choices, CPCs adamantly advocate against abortion regardless of the woman’s life and health circumstances, and needs.

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know we just launched a toolkit that helps women who have been deceived by CPCs’ harmful tactics to file complaints and seek justice. What you may not know, is that CPCs have been deliberately targeting women of color in urban communities.

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5 Reasons Why We’re Part of the One Billion Rising in Protest Against Violence Against Women

Posted by Shari Inniss-Grant, Fellow | Posted on: February 14, 2013 at 05:33 pm

As individuals willing to give voice to troubling problems and struggle towards difficult solutions, we rise on behalf of women.

As partners, advocates, family and friends, we rise in collaboration with survivors.

As a global community, we rise through women’s progress.

Rise for VAWA!These are the simple but fundamental truths V-day encourages us to reflect on. While it is often painful and uncomfortable to talk about the culture of violence and oppression that leads to 1 in 3 women being assaulted, beaten, or raped in her lifetime, the alternative is unthinkable. Silence is not an answer. Ignorance, as we’ve seen through the intense backlash against misguided statements related to assault, is not bliss. And the problem will not simply go away if we leave it alone.

However tattered, ugly, or shocking the truth may be, only by addressing facts rather than falling back on myths can we craft solutions (be they legislative, cultural or community-based) that truly improve people’s lives.

Myth 1: Violence against women is rare.

Truth: Violence toward women is extremely common. 1 in 3 women, approximately, 1 billion women, will experience violence in her lifetime. A perpetrator is more likely to be an intimate partner or family member than a stranger. In the U.S. a woman is beaten or assaulted every 9 seconds.

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Why Black, White and Latina Young Women Need (and Celebrate) Roe

Posted by Shari Inniss-Grant, Fellow | Posted on: January 22, 2013 at 01:52 pm

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.

Because women deserve itWhen my coworker posed the question, why are you celebrating women being able to access preventative services without a copay, my answer was sure and simple, “Because women deserve it.”

Not everyone agrees with that statement. If the last months of public debate have shown anything, it’s that there are a wide variety of views on the women’s right to access reproductive healthcare. Some people think it is good public policy and long overdue; others think that it’s a gift or worse, immoral.

I’m personally inclined to side with Justice Ginsberg. In reflecting on Roe she said, “[In] the balance is a woman’s autonomous charge of her full life’s course, her ability to stand in relation to men, society and to stay as an independent, self-sustaining equal citizen.” As I celebrate the ACA and Roe, I celebrate women’s ability to build lives they lives they desire. I’m grateful that reproductive healthcare is one of the tools that expands rather than constrains women’s decisions.

born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?

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The ACA Contraceptive Coverage Lawsuits: The Employee’s Right to Comprehensive Insurance Coverage

Posted by Shari Inniss-Grant, Fellow | Posted on: November 21, 2012 at 12:23 pm

Last week at a lunch with African advocates for women’s rights, we discussed pregnancy rates in Africa and the United States. Across the continents one thing remained constant—women have better outcomes when they are able to control their fertility. They enjoy greater freedom to pursue academic studies or careers, and to plan their lives as they see fit.

The ACA’s contraceptive coverage rule affords 47 million women this freedom by ensuring that they will be able to access birth control and related information through private insurance without having to worry about the cost. While many celebrate the anticipated improvements to women and children’s health, others are infuriated by the rule.

Opponents to birth control have made speeches decrying the rule, hosted conferences and brought lawsuit, after lawsuit, after lawsuit... Since the lawsuits have proved to be a publicity-gaining tool, we can anticipate many more.

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Abortion Can Save A Woman’s Life – And Restrictions Can End It

Posted by Shari Inniss-Grant, Fellow | Posted on: November 16, 2012 at 05:51 pm

Over the past months the nation has witnessed a heated conversation about reproductive healthcare. In several states anti-abortion law-makers have been outspoken in their attempt to convince states to deny their citizens access to abortion. Unfortunately, opposition to abortion has often been fueled by dangerous misinformation. Former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh claimed that the abortion bans he supported never endangered women’s lives or seriously threatened their health. “With modern technology, you can’t find one instance [of an abortion that saved the mother’s life]…There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing.”

Walsh ignores the reality that abortion is a medical procedure that can save women’s lives or improve their health. With maternal mortality on the rise, restrictive abortion policies that disregard these facts do more than overlook inconvenient truths—they can produce fatal outcomes.

In Ireland, a country with a near total ban on abortion, the procedure could have saved Savita Halappanaver’s life.

Savita Halappanaver was a young dentist attempting to start a family with her husband in Ireland. She was 17 weeks pregnant when severe back pain drove her to seek medical care at a local hospital. There she received the painful news that she was miscarrying and her fetus had no chance of survival. Knowing this and in tremendous pain, Savita asked that the doctors to terminate the pregnancy. They refused. Her family repeatedly pleaded with the hospital to treat Savita, but they only said that “Ireland is a Catholic country” and they would not abort while there was a fetal heartbeat.

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