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The Feminist Women's Health Center of Atlanta is a feminist health center that provides comprehensive gynecological health care, engages in community outreach, and advocates for reproductive justice. Kwajelyn Jackson has served as the executive director since 2018. [1]
The Feminist Women's Health Center (FWHC) was founded in 1977. FWHC was born out of self-help groups; these clinics were known for empowering women to make decisions about their healthcare. [2] To increase accessibility of health care resources and services, especially among women of color, the development of women’s health centers emerged in the late 20th century. These health centers “provide primary care to women, including reproductive care, pregnancy and childbirth care, breast cancer programs, and other essential services, with easy access to specialists when they are needed”. [3]
The Atlanta Feminist Women's Health Center is one of several extant feminist health centres in the United States. [4] It was a member clinic of the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centres (FFWHC). The Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centres originated in Los Angeles, and subsequent member clinics opened throughout California, Tallahassee, Florida, Atlanta, and Georgia. Women's health movement historian Sandra Morgen notes, "Until the National Black Women's Health Project... in the 1980s, the FFWHC was the only multiple-site group in the larger women's health movement." [5] All member clinics provided abortion and gynaecological health care, and worked together to "espouse a unified ideology and identifiable politics." [6]
The FFWHC member clinics adopted a more hierarchal model as other feminist clinics operated as collectives. The debate and dispute over the FFWHC's mode of operation reached a point where some women's health centres refused to refer clients to FFWHC clinics for abortions. In 1990, Carol Downer, founder of the Los Angeles FWHC and leader in the women's health movement, responded to the controversy, "Most of the criticisms I've heard revolve around hierarchy... I might say it was the difference between being organised and disorganised... It's hard for me to understand why anyone who goes into a political arena doesn't want to be as organised as they can possibly be... if you really are serious about what you are doing. Because otherwise you are the mercy of these larger forces which are organized." [7]
A few years after moving their headquarters to Eugene, Oregon, [8] the costs of operating the FFWHC offices proved too expensive. Although the member clinics stay in touch, they are no longer formally connected as a federation. [9] However, most of these clinics, including the Atlanta FWHC, are now part of a new consortium of women's health care providers, the Feminist Abortion Network.
The Feminist Women's Health Center offers a variety of sexual and reproductive health care programs, designed to reach historically underserved populations within the Atlanta community. [10]
FWHC provides both surgical and medication abortions in their Atlanta clinic. [11] In 2017, and 2018, FWHC performed abortions on 3,867 patients, including patients surviving trauma and dealing with fetal anomalies. [12]
FWHC offers annual wellness exams, pregnancy testing, miscarriage care, birth control and emergency contraception options, sexually transmitted infection screening and treatment, and HIV testing and counseling. [13] In 2017, and 2018, FWHC provided these services to 1,074 patients. [12]
The Feminist Women's Health Center began offering health services to trans-masculine individuals in 2000. The Trans Health Initiative was founded in the memory of Robert Eads, a partially transitioned trans man who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 53 after being denied medical care. [14]
The donor insemination program began at the Feminist Women's Health Center in 1988. The program began because most infertility specialists in the southern United States were only willing to offer their services to married women, leaving single heterosexual women and lesbians unable to access fertility treatments. [15] In a 1990 profile of the program, an employee of the center noted that only about 5% of the women seeking donor insemination were married, and about a third of the program's clients were lesbians. [16] In 2012, about 90% of clients identified as lesbians. [17]
In 2014, with fertility services and clinics more widely available, FWHC ended the donor insemination program to refocus efforts and resources on other services. [18]
Feminist Women's Health Center has formally advocated for legal access to abortion and healthcare at the local and state level for more than 20 years. FWHC engages a full-time lobbyist at the state Capitol, mobilizes community members for action alerts, coordinates advocacy days where volunteers can learn about the politics of reproductive justice and lobby their state legislators, [19] and educates on laws relevant to reproductive justice and legislative process, including voter engagement. [20]
On May 7, 2019, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed Georgia House Bill 481, a six-week abortion ban which was to take effect on January 1, 2020. [21]
In June 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on behalf of several reproductive justice advocates and abortion providers, including Feminist Women's Health Center. [22] [23] Although initially enjoined by Judge Steve C. Jones in July 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit allowed the law to take effect in June 2022 in light of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. [24]
On March 12, 2012, the Feminist Women's Health Center organized a protest at the Georgia State Capitol, along with a wide range coalition partners that included ACLU – Georgia and SisterSong Reproductive Justice Collective. [25] [26] The protest was in response to a spate of legislation that would restrict Georgia women's access to reproductive health care, ranging from religious exemptions for birth control coverage to a twenty-week abortion ban. [27] [28] Over five hundred people showed up to the protest, [29] [30] which was organized around the principles that women have a right to: [31]
Like other feminist health centers, [32] Feminist Women's Health Center recognizes that access to health care is closely linked with politics and other social factors. As a result, FWHC has a community engagement and advocacy department in addition to providing health care at their clinic. FWHC's community engagement has transpired through a variety of programs designed to serve specific populations, including Black women, refugees, queer women, men, and young leaders. [18] Today, the clinic engages volunteers and hosts a reproductive justice book club, in addition to key programs, the Lifting Latinx Voices initiative and the Errin J. Vuley Fellows Program.
The Lifting Latinx Voices Initiative is a health outreach program that strives to empower and educate the Latinx community in addition to addressing health disparities that impact Latinx people. [33] [34] Using the community leadership model of promotores de salud from Latin American countries, the initiative offers open and safe spaces to discuss reproductive health and address specific needs and barriers. [35]
The Errin J. Vuley Fellows Program was launched in 2017 to support community leaders in building skills and knowledge through a reproductive justice framework. Named for FWHC's first community engagement coordinator, [36] the fellowship focuses especially on Vuley's advocacy for abortion access, trans justice and racial justice. Through monthly workshops and retreats, fellows learn from each other and community organizations, setting them up for futures in movement work. [37]
The United States abortion-rights movement is a sociopolitical movement in the United States supporting the view that a woman should have the legal right to an elective abortion, meaning the right to terminate her pregnancy, and is part of a broader global abortion-rights movement. The movement consists of a variety of organizations, with no single centralized decision-making body.
An abortion clinic or abortion provider is a medical facility that provides abortions. Such clinics may be public medical centers, private medical practices or nonprofit organizations such as Planned Parenthood.
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a United States law that was signed by President Bill Clinton in May 1994, which prohibits the following three things: (1) the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is obtaining an abortion, (2) the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is exercising or trying to exercise their First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship, (3) the intentional damage or destruction of a reproductive health care facility or a place of worship.
Byllye Yvonne Avery is an American health care activist. A proponent of reproductive justice, Avery has worked to develop healthcare services and education that address black women's mental and physical health stressors. She is best known as the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project, the first national organization to specialize in Black women's reproductive health issues. For her work with the NBWHP, she has received the MacArthur Foundation's Fellowship for Social Contribution and the Gustav O. Lienhard Award for the Advancement of Health Care from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, among other awards.
Carol Downer is an American feminist lawyer and non-fiction author who focused her career on abortion rights and women's health around the world. She was involved in the creation of the self-help movement and the first self-help clinic in LA, which later became a model and inspiration for dozens of self-help clinics across the United States.
The National Women's Health Network (NWHN) is a non-profit women's health advocacy organization located in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1975 by Barbara Seaman, Alice Wolfson, Belita Cowan, Mary Howell, and Phyllis Chesler. The stated mission of the organization is to give women a greater voice within the healthcare system. The NWHN researches and lobbies federal agencies on such issues as AIDS, reproductive rights, breast cancer, older women's health, and new contraceptive technologies. The Women's Health Voice, the NWHN's health information program, provides independent research on a variety of women's health topics.
Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework that was invented as a response to United States reproductive politics. The three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. The framework moves women's reproductive rights past a legal and political debate to incorporate the economic, social, and health factors that impact women's reproductive choices and decision-making ability.
Merle Hoffman is an American journalist and activist.
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A feminist health center is an independent, not-for-profit, alternative medical facility that primarily provides gynecological health care. Many feminist health centers were founded in the 1970s as part of the women's health movement in the United States. These centers were founded with the purposes of challenging the medicalization of health care, providing an alternative to mainstream health facilities, and increasing access to gynecological information and services for all women, regardless of race, class, sexual orientation, or insurance coverage.
The Feminist Abortion Network (FAN) is a national consortium of independent, feminist, not-for-profit abortion care providers. Although more than fifty such health care providers once existed, today fourteen clinics remain in operation. FAN was formed in 2006 to promote information-sharing, cross-organizational strategizing and improve the overall efficacy and reach of the member clinics.
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Abortion-rights movements, also self-styled as pro-choice movements, are movements that advocate for legal access to induced abortion services, including elective abortion. They seek to represent and support women who wish to terminate their pregnancy without fear of legal or social backlash. These movements are in direct opposition to anti-abortion movements.
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