Kinda like that issue of Time Magazine where they said "the person of the year is everyone", only less cheesy. (photo via Flickr, taken by user Jessica E Sideways. Shared under a Creative Commons license.)

This post, then, is about those people; people who are getting on with the everyday business of making change happen. That ranges from people who work in charities, NGOs, and support organisations; people who lobby and campaign; and people who are acting on the change they’d like to see in their interactions with the people around them.

So here, then, are just some of the many organisations run by awesome people, doing awesome things on a daily basis.

• African Feminist Forum – They run biennial conferences for feminist activists in Africa, and make efforts to include the voices of groups often marginalised within African feminism (and arguably feminist movements in many countries) – commercial sex workers, women with disabilities, and bisexual rights activists.
• Central American Women’s Network – They’re working to improve the political, social and cultural rights of women in Central America through advocacy and campaigning, and raising awareness in the UK and US. Freedoms in Honduras have been a particular issue since the coup d’etat of 2009.
• Women’s Budget Group  – Based in the UK, they’re bringing gender analysis to economic policy, because it’s hard to work for an equal society when the vast impact of government expenditure is skewed in favour of one portion of the population.
• British Insitute of Human Rights – Because human rights for everyone is very much a feminist issue, and the BIHR are one of several fantastic groups supporting that. (See also: Liberty, Amnesty International)
• Race On The Agenda – Too often the history of feminist discussion has been marred by an unfortunate exclusion of the voices from often-marginalised groups such as the Black and Asian communities. ROTA are one of the organisations helping to keep things more inclusive.
• Powerhouse – Women with disabilities are another group that’s been too often pushed to one side or rendered invisible. Run “by and for women with learning disabilities”, Powerhouse bring focus to this.
• The Feminist Library – Libraries are basically the most awesome things ever, and this one carries a huge stock of feminist literature. It should hardly need explaining why this is an entire industrial-sized vat of pure brilliance.
• The Survivor Project – I want to include these folk, because judging from what I’ve read they’re awesome, but unfortunately they seem to be without a website currently, so, er, you’ll have to find them yourselves later. They’re a non-profit working against domestic and sexual violence against anyone, but with a particular focus on trans* and intersex survivors. It’s an issue that’s all too often ignored in the mainstream. (If in the future a website becomes available, hopefully we’ll be able to draw attention to it.)

This list isn’t even remotely exhaustive, and couldn’t possibly hope to be. There are more people out there working to support good ideas than I have any chance of adequately enumerating here. The fact that I can only post a tiny, miniscule example of some of the many groups and organisations involved in this is, honestly, brilliant. It’d be a worrying sign if every beneficial organisation could be summed up in the space of one post. For more comprehensive overviews of the groups out there though, do check the members list for the Women’s Resource Centre and the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations. (Of course, that only covers groups based at least partially in the UK. The list gets even longer when we go global.)

And then of course there’s the fact that the above list has only covered organisations, groups, and charities. We’ve yet to even touch on the vast array of feminist bloggers, writers, artists, and others out there making their ideas visible. Or the yet wider group who don’t have a public podium from which to spread their message but are engaged in thinking about, discussing and living with this as a part of their daily world view.

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of us, and the collective weight behind this set of ideas is formidable. And that’s seven shades of kickass.

• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!

Today is World Down Syndrome Day 2011.

I don’t know how much you know about Down Syndrome as an individual reader. Don’t know much about it? Go and find out more about it. Think you know about it? Take some time to read and listen a bit more. Don’t be the person who scrolls on, eh?

I learned about Down Syndrome Day because I have a younger sister with Down Syndrome whom I lived with for sixteen years (I only moved out about two years ago) and so my family have lifetime membership of the Down Syndrome Association. I’d like everyone to know about it, though.

I’m not going to tell you a great deal about my family here because this is a short post – and because I haven’t asked what my sister thinks either about blogging on here, or being blogged about, yet, and not to do so would be at the least a bit cheeky. And also missing the point massively, in that “raising awareness” doesn’t mean I (an able-bodied person) get to trot out my non-consenting family on the internet in the name of Issues, or decide that me posting is better than actually getting they themselves on here to speak.

But here are some things to look at and read:

• Why disability is a feminist issue, from Feminists With Disabilities for a Way Forward. It’s a US-based perspective, but really, you should read it. Edit: this post too.
• A recent case of completely shitty education-based discrimination against a young woman with Down Syndrome. The words of her parents on this one struck a depressingly familiar chord with mine. They’ve had to navigate this sort of bullshit far too often, too.
• Mencap: find out more about what a learning disability is. Over 1.5 million people in the UK have a learning disability, so if you really care about activism and intersectionality of any kind, it’s worth your time. Seriously.

Will you let us in? A five minute film, covering 45 countries.

Read, think, share links around, and have a good week.

I asked some leading UK pro-choice campaigners whether the US reproductive justice approach introduced in Part 1 is relevant to their work, and what – if anything – might be gained from creating a similar movement in Britain.

Shaming black women

Black British women are, according to Department of Health statistics, more likely to have an abortion than their white counterparts (source).  On the other side of the Atlantic there has been some especially poisonous anti-choice campaigning based around a similar difference. Georgia Right to Life posted 80 billboards around the city of Atlanta proclaiming “Black people are an endangered species”, with a website address: toomanyaborted.com. Loretta Ross, National Co-ordinator of SisterSong, described it as:

a misogynistic attack to shame-and-blame black women who choose abortion, alleging that we endanger the future of our children… Our opponents used a social responsibility frame to claim that black women have a racial obligation to have more babies – especially black male babies — despite our individual circumstances.

Alarmingly, the UK anti-choice movement has already begun to adopt some of the US campaigning messages about the ‘black genocide’. Lisa Hallgarten, Director of Education for Choice, reported that “the Marie Stopes International clinic in Brixton is routinely picketed by antis who claim that MSI is trying to kill black babies. I have seen leaflets that claim that Brook is a eugenic organisation.” This is just the latest trend in a pattern of UK anti-choicers adopting US campaigning tactics.

Reproductive rights

I wanted to know whether the broader ‘reproductive rights’ approach had been adopted in the UK at all, by which I mean looking at contraception, sex education, adoption and the socioeconomic factors which impact on women’s decisions about whether or not to have children alongside calling for the right to safe, legal abortion.

Darinka Aleksic, Abortion Rights Campaign Co-ordinator, said that “because British women do not experience the extremes of health inequalities on ethnic or economic grounds that women in the US do (although I’m not minimizing those that exist), the repro rights approach has not, in my opinion, been quite so vital or so relevant to our situation.”

Lisa agreed that a rights-based approach hasn’t been widely adopted: “Since UK policy can be made or broken by the Daily Mail it is hard to take an abstract political or human rights approach to these things”. But she was clear on some of the problems with the existing situation, including the emphasis on abortion as a medical issue:

The public health approach is fundamentally limited and limiting because it relies on scientific evidence supporting the role of abortion in public health. For me there is a point where personal autonomy may trump public health and we should always keep our commitment to autonomy at the forefront of discussion.

And the absence of universal high quality sex education:

Lack of sex education is a clear obstacle not just to the people who are young at that point in time, but to society getting better at talking about sex. I think, realistically, that some fundamental work needs to be done on coming to terms with human sexuality as a society before anyone will have the courage or funding to stand up in government and take a reproductive justice approach to these things.

Abortion rights and social justice

Finally I asked Lisa and Darinka if it would be helpful to put the campaign to protect and extend abortion rights in the UK in a wider context of social justice, and whether there was a risk of losing support in the medical establishment if it came to be seen as a campaigning issue rather than a question of health policy.

Lisa said that:

Our whole law was put in place to medicalise the procedure, put it under doctors’ control and protect doctors. I think there is a big danger of losing their support if they don’t feel ownership of it.

However, the greater danger is that we don’t have a broad grassroots movement to protect abortion rights in this country. If we built a reproductive justice movement we would have a much more broad-based constituency to come out fighting when our rights are up for grabs in the Commons.

Darinka explained that “Abortion Rights’ primary role is to defend the 1967 Abortion Act.” But also that:

As an organization that has strong links to the trade union movement, we are inclined to stress the importance of abortion access as an economic issue. It has always been working class women who have suffered from a lack of access to safe, legal abortion.

Public service and spending cuts are going to hit women hardest and the reorganization of the NHS raises real questions about how access to abortion and contraception services will be maintained. So we are campaigning against the cuts alongside other organizations on a broader social justice basis.

Reproductive justice for the UK?

After talking to Mara, Lisa and Darinka it became clear that there are opportunities for the UK pro-choice movement in the reproductive justice approach, although simply importing the US model wouldn’t work. In Britain public and medical establishment support for the right to choose is far greater, there are fewer differences in access to healthcare along lines of race or sexual orientation, and there is more state support for families.

However, the British sexual and reproductive health landscape is shifting. While the usual attacks on the Abortion Act are being launched in Westminster (and Abortion Rights tirelessly resists them) a few more developments have been added to the mix over the last year – including controversy around the sterilisation of drug addicts and those with severe learning disabilities, the end of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, mass popular protests against the Pope’s visit, the crisis in midwifery, and health professionals calling out shoddy sex education in the media.

While there are a whole range of fantastic organizations working variously to defend and extend abortion rights and access, to improve sex education and sexual health, to support families and advance LGBT and women’s rights, to fight racism and inequalities in access to or influence on public services, this work doesn’t take place under a shared banner of Reproductive Justice.

I am a campaigner; I understand the need to choose your battles and your targets carefully. But as the ideological reforms of what is essentially a Tory government start to bite, I wonder if the battle may be coming to us. Perhaps it’s time to build a movement and raise the flag.

• With thanks to Education for Choice, Abortion Rights and the Abortion Support Network: three amazing charities that deserve your support.