USA – My Body No Choice: taking the fight for abortion rights to the stage

A new stage production tells the stories of women and their bodily autonomy, or lack thereof, as part of the fight to reverse the supreme court decision to restrict abortion

David Smith
Thu 27 Oct 2022

Theirs was a secret space. In the early 1970s, Molly Smith and her sister Bridget attended weekly women’s consciousness-raising sessions in a friend’s living room near Washington’s Catholic University. They read books such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, a groundbreaking text about women’s health and sexuality. Sitting on cushions, the circle of women listened to one another, laughed and cried and shared their deepest secrets.

“Women needed spaces where they could be open, where they could be uncompromising, where they could speak about the beginnings of their feminism, where they could speak about their stories around their bodies without shame,” Smith, now 70, recalls by phone. “A lot of women didn’t understand their bodies at all.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/oct/26/my-body-no-choice-supreme-court-abortion-rights-stage


USA – At SIFF, a day in the life of doctors who provide abortions

At SIFF, a day in the life of doctors who provide abortions
The documentary ‘Our Bodies, Our Doctors’ profiles women’s health professionals in the Pacific Northwest.

By Brangien Davis
May 28, 2019

A day in the life of an abortion provider usually starts in a parking lot. She gets out of her car, slings a purse and maybe a lunch bag over her shoulder, and walks toward a nondescript building. She might greet a protester on the way in, might note the giant baby photo on the side of a box truck parked in deliberate view. She passes through the clinic doors, where a circular sticker bears the image of a black handgun with a red slash across it. Once inside, the doctor joins her team of receptionists, medical assistants and nurses, and prepares for the first patient.

Behind the headlines, behind the legal battles, behind the politics, protests and posters are the people who go to work every day to provide women with family-planning services, including contraception and abortion.

Continued: https://crosscut.com/2019/05/siff-day-life-doctors-who-provide-abortions