When I was in my twenties, I moved to New York City on a whim. I didn't have much money, and I was more or less squatting an empty apartment. I slept on an air mattress on a tile floor, and I barely knew anyone. On the way to my third day of a brand new job, I got sick on the subway platform. A stranger rubbed my back and held my hair. Do you think you might be pregnant, honey, she asked in a hushed tone. A few days later, I took the subway to a clinic. I didn't tell anybody, and I went alone. On the cab ride back to my apartment, I was feeling really weak and could barely move. The driver double parked and helped me make it up the four flights of stairs to my apartment. He helped me inside. I crawled into bed with all my clothes on, and cried and cried for what seemed like hours. I've never felt more ashamed or alone, but I wasn't alone. You're listening to afrop Punk Solution Sessions. I'm your host Brigittad, and I'm your co host Eve Jeff co acro Punk is a safe place, a blank space to freak out in, to construct a new reality, to live our lives as we see fit, or making sense of the world around us. Here at Afro Punk, we have the conversations that matter to us, conversations that lead to solutions. On today's episode, we're talking about what reproductive justice looks like for us. The right to have a baby, the right to raise that baby in a safe community, the right to not have a baby if you don't want to, the right to access information about your own body and health to make informed choices. The right to not have anything done to your body without your consent. And when you were started, they let you do it. You can do anything whatever you want. We talk a lot about reproductive rights, but too often those conversations center white, middle class women. Here's activists and writer MICHAELA Angela Davis after a Punk Solution sessions in Atlanta. I have a whole different relationship to plan parenthood as right, like it was CECIL and it was Pink Hats, that representative organization that most of us needed. So that trying to kind of close that fissure of the separation of these big national movements and US and like what I said at the Women's March for black women, like all this hair can't get up under pink pussy hats, right, So, and also these are symbols that black women don't resonate with. I don't resonate with a pussy hat, I don't resonate with a slut walk, right So part of that also kind of excludes us just by them symbolism like we wear like black berets and leathern jacksons ship when we haven't a you know, a revolution, like we're gonna become fly. While working at Planned Parenthood, I saw the ways that folks that the margins have not always been included, affirmed and centered and conversations around feminism, particularly when it comes to reproductive rights. White women are not the only women who should be involved in conversations around sexual health, and too often our black, trans, queer and non binary people are left out of the conversation entirely. And this is a problem. We live in a country where one in three trans people and forty percent of trans men have delayed or avoided preventative healthcare like pelvic exams or s t I screenings out of fear of discrimination or disrespect. Folks at the margins are disproportionately impacted by sexual and reproductive health disparities, and when it comes to reproductive healthcare for LGBTQ folks, the word care can be kind of a misnomer. Participating in the American healthcare system can mean going to beat with anti blackness, antiqueer miss miseducation, and just straight up ignorance. Good care care that recognizes and respects the needs of black, gender nonconforming intersects and trance people isn't always affordable or accessible, if it's even an option at all. While accepting an award on behalf of Martin Luther King in n Credit, Scott King said that Black communities have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern. She was right, which is by centering Black communities and conversations about reproductive health is so important and something that Monica Simpson talked about Atlanta Afropunk Solution sessions. Black women are dying at a rate four times higher than white women and childbirth. That means in terms of us like being able to like give birth to children, bringing more children into this world. We are dying at a rate four times higher than white women and childbirth in the South. In some cities like New York, the statistics are worse, where black women are dying at a rate twelve times higher than white women in childbirth. Black women are only making sixty four cents on a dollar to take care of themselves their families. Black women are being criminalized for pregnancy. They're being criminalized for standing up against domestic violence. Black women are dealing with a broken immigration system that's tearing apart our families, that's making it difficult for us to be able to build the types of family structures that we want in this country and where that we deserve. When black women organizers realize their concerns are being ignored by the abortion rights movement, they created the concept of reproductive justice. Black women created reproductive justice because we understood that our lives are inextricably linked from the very real issues that we all face. So these women are were standing standing on our ancestors, their shoulders, our ancestors that were stolen from our land and brought here, our ancestors that learn how to pack themselves with her to rib their bodies of the slave master's child, our ancestors whose bodies were used coercively, and whose bodies were used and violated. And so as we have these conversations, as we are all working tirelessly in this movement towards Black liberation, we can't do that and forget our wounds. We can't do that and forget about the future generations that will come through them. We cannot forget about the fact that our sexual identities, our sexual orientations, our gender, all of that needs to be centered and not moved to the margins. Monica Simpson is the current executive director of Sister Song in Atlanta, a collective that works to improve institutional policies and systems that impacts the reproductive lives of marginalized communities in the South. At Afropunk Solution Sessions in Atlanta, Monica explained that reproductive justice is as much about what's happening inside our wombs as what's going on outside of them. If you have a child, it should be your right to raise that child in an environment free from police violence, environmental injustice, and economic injustice. Reproductive justice is that connecting factor in a world where white supremacy tells us that we were not meant to survive in a world where white supremacy tells us that we don't deserve a future. Reproductive justice is answered to that is, yes we do, and black women will continue to lead that work in connection with our other sisters, to make sure that we see the other side. If you live in a community where you can't raise a child without fearing that shall be killed by police or gun violence, then you aren't truly able to exercise reproductive freedom, which is why police violence is a reproductive justice issue. I hold onto my own wom when I think about what does it mean to give birth to a black baby in this world today? What does it mean for that black baby to come through this Southern queer black body that's now over the age of thirty five and so I'm considered geriatric. What does it mean when I think about and I see the faces of my nephews Andrew and Luke and Demonte and think about them growing up as little black boys in this country. I think about Trayvon Martin's mom. I think about Mike Brown's mother. I think about Jordan David's mother. I think about Ayana Stanley's family. I want all of you to know Sandy was more than a hashtag. That's what I want everybody to know. Sandra Bland was more than a hashtag, and we will continue fighting for justice for her. I even wonder sometime if Sandra Bland was still with us today, would you want to have children or not? We'll have more solution sessions after this quick break. When it comes to abortion, Black women are specifically shamed for our choices. If we terminated pregnancy, were shamed. If you bring a child into the world before we're able to support her, were labeled welfare queens. We can't win. In two thousand and ten, right here in Atlanta that we're billboards that went up in this community that said the most dangerous place for an African American child is in the mother's womb. This billboard campaign stretched all across the country, shaming Black women for their reproductive decision making, shaming us, saying that we were committing genocide on our own communities because we were deciding not to have children to end our pregnancies. When this billboard hit, black women doing reproductive justice work gathered together and said that it was time for a united response, that we would not sit silent to any attack against our reproductive freedom, any attack against our lives, we aren't just shamed from our own communities, from public policy and laws as well. Just look at the recent attacks on reproductive health both here and abroad. On his first day in office, Trump reinstated the global Gag rule, meaning global health workers overseas cannot talk about abortion or offer abortion related information, referrals, or services if they the federal funding. Make no mistake, Black and brown women and girls will die because of this rule and here in the United States, or legislation like Trump's pushed to roll back birth control coverage and the push for twenty week abortion bands keep Black women from being in control of our own bodies. These attacks on our reproductive health aren't just political, their attacks on our agency. At Afropunk Solution sessions in Atlanta, Planned Parenthood director of public Engagement Ellensia Johnson called this out. I tell people all the time that this fight around agency, especially for black women. For me and I can say this is I'm Black. They don't want us having babies anymore because we're not free labor, right Like, I'm not giving birth to free labor anymore. So what's the point of you having me having agency over my body to give birth to a child that I want to live in a functioning society where they're safe and they don't die when they're young. Right. I think with the twenty week abortion band, it is so stigmatizing and criminalizing for women, particularly women of color, are particularly low income women. Because I want to contextualize it a little bit, majority of women who seek an abortion after twenty weeks it is because of the life of the mother or the child or both is in danger or and then what is happening back to Dorian's question of what's happening in the States while they have these waiting periods for folks if they go and they say they want to have an abortion, so you might have a four d eight hour ten seven two hour waiting period. Well, if you are a low income woman, or if you have multiple kids and you don't have childcare, you don't have a job where you can take off multiple days, or you don't have a car or the money or the resources to drive a hundred miles. You can't go somewhere and then go home and then take more days off. But guess what happens. Then you're continuing to delay a pregnancy. So while you have decided, you made this decision about your body, maybe like ten weeks in because of all these laws, of these restrictive laws, your past twenty weeks right, And so they've created and they being the opposition, this very white leg conservative movement, who I don't think our Christians. My daddy is a pastor and supports women's agency. They co opted Jesus. They are over here, they have They are over here telling women that we cannot make the best decisions for our lives and that for some reason there's something wrong with us for making a very difficult decision. When you've got into twenty weeks, that is a very difficult decision. I have friends that that's that's actually happened too. And so I think the push back on these attacks, you have the people in d C, the political folks, advocate folks who are doing their work. But I need black women, especially to come forward and tell stories. Gabby saying, I used to work at Playing Parenthood Together. Her work involves talking to black women about shame to health, de stigmatized conversations around abortion, sexuality, and reproductive health. Growing up in the church, in a very conservative church, we were allowed to wear makeup. We were told we're in makeup. Wasn't what she it right, And so I didn't wear makeup, and Ton was about five years old. At first I didn't know how, and I still don't know how. But second it was something that I was taught. I had big lips. They said, you have big lips. You don't need to emphasize your big lips anymore. I was born with hips in a big, old fat ass, and it just has been here my entire life, and I was taught that you need to cover it up right. I didn't wear short skirts, I didn't wear things that hung to my hips because I was taught very early on that I should be ashamed of my body. So, in thinking about stigma and shame, it would be great for you all just to tell us a short story about shame and how it showed up in your life and how you overcome it um and and advice that you give other young people, young women in particular, about overcoming the stigmas that hold us down. Here was Jessica Bird at Atlanta Afro Punk Solution Sessions. My aunt told me at a very young age that I was frisky, right, and it messed me up for a very long time because I felt so much shame and so that she was like, because I was out there in my glory, honey, I used to love to, you know, walk in my dresses and I would be all in front of everybody. I just love to be a bit of an exhibitionist. And she's like, but you're frisky, and so I would. I held onto that and it made me really really like just shrink inside of myself, like I cannot stand and walk in my fullness. And I carried that with me through my adolescence where I started having sex at a very young age. Right again, I grew up in this small rural town and that's not a lot to do, but we figured out you could do it very easily, you know, in the South. So I did, you know, and my other friends were doing it, and we were having lots of sex, but nobody was helping to educate us on like what that meant, and so we felt like we had to keep this really silent. And then when someone ended up pregnant, then they were shamed for it. But I'm like, what you all were not even providing a space for us to talk about what our bodies are doing and like all these things that's running through us. I want to have sex, I think anyway, I don't know, right, But those conversations um but became very shaming because nobody to have the conversation about six. It's not just our sexualities or lips or booties that make us feel shame. Sometimes it's what's happening inside our bodies too. So how many people know what fibroids are. That's Tanka Gray val Brine and she's talking about her experiences with benign gross on her uterus called fibroids. She had twenty seven fibroids removed from her uterus. One in every five women has fibroids. Million women between the ages of fifteen and fifty will have them. They're incredibly common in black bodies, yet they're not really talked about. Janika says she's never worn a white dress in her life because she constantly worries about the hemorrhaging that her condition causes. She started the White Dress Project so women with fribroids wouldn't have to suffer in silence. But for Chanika, her story really begins with her mom. She was born um in Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica to a teacher named Aina and mechanic name Alvin and growing up on the land in Jamaica. Growing up on the farm, we had many, many health discussions in our family. UM. I can give you remedies and concoctions of mint tea and ginger tea and seracy tea and molasses and yes, yes, anything that you need, UM to be cured from headaches too, ankle sprains. I seriously have it me my grandmother, UM, because that's the type of family we were raised in. Pharmaceuticals weren't always available to us, so it was important to figure out how to live off the land and to basically cure ourselves naturally. UM. So when my mother started to share her thoughts on fibroids and her journey with fibroids with me, UM, it was very devastating to me. At age, my mom lost her first set of twins due to fibroids. And for those of you who might not understand that, because fibroids grow in the same area UM that a baby grows, basically it's fibroids or the baby, and in my mom's situation, the fibroids suffocated the baby be so she lost her first set of twins, and then she got pregnant with me, and I was an only child and I made it and I'm still an only child. So she got excited and got pregnant again and lost a set of twins after me. And through that, I learned that there is so much power in the patient story. You don't have to be experiencing fibroids, but you can have Another ailment that we're not talking about is women. I don't know about the women in the audience, but I know that I was taught to be classy, sophisticated. You don't talk about issues below the belt. You're a woman. You have your period, you bleed, get over it. But I realized that there is no way that you can be hemorrhaging the way that fibroids causes you to hemorrhage. That you can have the pelvic pressure and pain that you do and you not speak up for yourself. If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you've enjoyed it through a Neil Hurston once wrote, as black women, we've been talked to be silent about our pain, a phenomena nots on one Solution Sessions panelist. You know, you grow up in a home as a female, and you are taught to be demure and respectful and subservient. You know, I grew up in a home where I got my period and the only conversation that happened was don't let a boy touch you. That doesn't really take you very far. And it starts at home, right, It starts with you being able to have a good sense of who you are as a woman and be able to appreciate and and really uplift yourself and and your body. And so if we don't start having these types of conversations to normalize what it is that our body is naturally doing, this is part of like the stigma that's associated with why you're told not to wear white, why you're told, um, you know, you don't want anyone to see you. What why you're told not to talk about having your period. For the men in the room, we have periods. Y'all know that it's a thing. It's a bodily function, it's a human function, and so it's okay to talk about it. Black women are supposed to be strong. Just look at the black women we see on TV. Society tells us that we're expected to shoulder not just our burdens, but the burdens of everyone else as well. As a black woman. I just have two things I want to say about last night's selection. You're welcome. While all of America was on the edge of their seats waiting to see if an accused pedophile would get into the United States Senate, of black women in Alabama voted for the other guy, because, as my dad says, black women laugh and joke, but we don't play. The women who saved us last night were just regular black women. They were black women in Alabama. Do you know what they have to go through every day? Those women woke up yesterday and we're like, I gotta deal with systemic racism, that gender pay gap, the school to prison pipeline humidity, and now y'all want me to save a merriment. There will be more solution sessions after this quick break. Doctors don't even take our pain as seriously as they do our white counterparts. But black women do feel pain, and masking up as what clinical psychologist Jazz Keys calls black superwomen, is killing us. You know her because you've seen her so many times. She's bold, fierce and unflinching, seemingly invincible black lady. But you got me twisted, O G. I'm always going to eat. In media, you can hear the idea that the black woman being the superwoman of the caricature isn't only used to shape fictional personalities in pop culture, it's also a standard to which society holds all African American women. And it is that mindset that has passed down to African American girls and women from generation to generation. But there's a problem. I don't think it's very sustainable at all. And if it is sustainable, if a person survives living this way, we would need to take a really good look at their health. A new study finds African American patients are often treated differently when it comes to medicine and care. The survey of more than five hundred people, four hundred of the medical students found implicit bias exists that may help explain why black people are sometimes undertreated for pain. Among its findings, medical students believe that African Americans felt less pain than white patients and even thought their skin was thicker. Dorothy Roberts is a medical problem or a sociological problem. It's both. I think what's really important and fascinating about the study is that it for the first time links what we've long known is under treatment of pain for black patients with doctors, or at least medical students, false beliefs about biological differences based on race. I think you see it everywhere. I think you see it when you look at the kinds of black women that become pop culture figures. Think about women who seem very strong and together, who don't seem to show cracks. You know, there's this writer Tiffany Doofu who talks about the first time that her daughter saw her cry and that she said, Mom, I didn't think that you felt things like that. I didn't think that you cried, and how shocking that was for her that she had created an environment where her daughter, who was also a young black woman, thought that her own mother didn't experience normal emotions because that's just the environment that she established in her household. I think we do carry a lot of burdens, and we do so silently, because you know, when you're a black woman, there is so much of a burden to have it all together, be polished and perfect, lest somebody think that you're not a good representative of your of your race and gender. We deal with so much misogyn or, and I think that's a function of of why we feel the need to pretend to be so strong all the time. Right. Not only is it it's something that it's been stigmatized in Black women, it's something that has been forced upon to us by the health care system. So I remember there was this time when I had a panic attack one night when I was in college, and I couldn't breathe. So I was just like, you know, I don't know if this is a this is connected to the panic attack or not, but I really feel like I can't breathe right now, you know. It was really really freaking out, and so I had to be rushed to the e R. And I got to the e R. And after waiting in the e R, we know how slowly they move and how inefficient it can be. After waiting in the er for hours and having an I V in my arm and not being able to be in the room, I finally got to the doctor and in our three minute five minute conversation, the conclusion that he came to was that I had anxiety and that was without doing any sort of testing, without putting out any other sort of suggestions for what could be wrong with me before the conclusion was that I had anxiety because of things that were going on in my life. You know that that just really manifested in physical property. And after going to other doctors, of course, where I landed was going to a black woman doctor who diagnosed me with an actual condition, which was like inflammation of my esophagus. So it wasn't anxiety at all. It wasn't anxiety at all. I mean, part of me feels it sucks that you did not get the proper diagnosis. Part of me surprised you got a diagnosis at all. I've seen that situation play out where it's it's in your head, go home, stop googling things, You're fine. And the thing about it is it's a form of gas lighting. And for me, I was like, well, maybe this is anxiety because there is ship going on in my life that could possibly manifest in something like a panic attack. It was a conflation of the two. Even though I actually did have a panic attack, and maybe those sort of things can manifest in something like a panic attack, that doesn't mean that I wasn't actually going through a different condition. Yeah, you know, we see these stories time and time again, particularly for folks who are marginalized, who just have the medical care industry take our pain and our issues, see bviously, because they really don't. And that just goes to show the importance of what folks like Allencia and Michaela say that we need to learn how to advocate for each other and ourselves because a lot of times the medical community is not here for us, and we need to take our health into our own hands. At Atlanta Afro Punk Solution Sessions, Michaela Angela Davis spoke to this need for Black women to suffer in silence. Black women will suffer and hold on to pain and and sug through when we're bleeding for a month. If you all can relate to that, just click your fingers say amen. But that I mean, I think that's something that um, we've also been taught that we we are supposed to hold burden and that we are supposed to contain pain, and that we and this is a trope that has been taught to everyone that black women can just take it. And so the fact that you're coming into e Er with five boys because you've been bleeding for Like, that's that's a problem. So what do we do? How do we get to a place where we can talk about our bodies without that isolating stigma and shame. Michaelis says that one way is to find strength and the power of sisterhood and centering black women. Well, this is part of it, right, like making sure that we stay in sisterhood no matter where we are, whether it's at a festival, whether it's at our you know, kitchen tables. But for me, me personally, this whole resistance movement, for me has become I'm resisting doing white folks work right and really focusing in on us right and vote and hyper focusing on Black women and how to um not just center them, but to amplify them. And we have these tools in our hands that lets us see each other in numbers, in in in quality, quantity. So I'm really asking all of you all who are here, use your use your platform, use your phone to say that you were here, say that you're here with your sister, say that that you support your sister. And I don't know, maybe I'm going crazy, me listen, like this is really the only way that I can survive this moment is with inside of sisterhood. That to me is the antidote to patriarchy, right That to me is the antidote to white supremacy, and it's the thing that we've been cultured to avoid. And we can use that power to make sure that we're standing up for each other's health and well being because we're all we got. We don't have to suffer in silence, and you're not alone. I believe the sisterhood is a superpower. So part of maybe what we can do today is commit to supporting each other into making that appointment. Because also we are also I think conditioned to believe that we have to do everything by ourselves. And we can do things for ourselves, but not by ourselves. So it's somebody is anybody here with a girlfriend like your homie. So you turn to your girlfriend right now and make a commitment to supporting her into going to get her jack up and you all can go together. We need to squat up right for everything in particulous because I just learned a bunch of stuff. Olyncia says, we can't expect black women to be strong all the damn time. We feel pain, we get tired, we need time to heal. Let's change the narrative that says otherwise. Well, we have to also be honest that like, it's time for everybody to stand with black women and stop coming to us to fix everything. Somebody let us heal and and so we you'll see some some posters around here that stand with black women. Uh, these shirts and posters that we have out here, it was a black woman who designed those four plane parenthood and we were like, we need something that's actually black women censored. And guess what, We're gonna get a black woman to do it, because it's time for folks to stand with us, but also let us lead. But also if I'm tired, let me be tired, let me be come stand forwards while we're taking it. Yeah, nobody should get to define the boundaries and borders of our own bodies but us. When I think back to my time in that clinic, I felt so alone, but I wasn't. I was there with the legacy of all the black women who came before me and helped make space for me to make choices about my own body. Had I decided to have a child, These same women bought for my ability to parent that child safely. We have to support each other and affirm our rights to govern our own bodies and our right to make safe, healthy and informed choices about our experiences. Because if we don't fight for each other and ourselves, no one else will. What's the solution? Bridget Center black and queer people and conversations about reproductive justice. What's the solution, Bridget, Don't be afraid to speak up about how you feel. What's the solution, Bridget? Take care of each other. What's the solution? Bridget Buck stigma and fuck shame? Yeah. M afrop Punk Solution Sessions is a co production between Afro Punk and How Stuff Works. Your hosts are Bridget Todd and Eve's Jeff Cope. Executive co producers are Julie Douglas, Jocelyn Cooper, and Kuan latif Hill. Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and Kathleen Quillian is audio engineer. Many many thanks to Casey Pegram and Annie Reese for their production and editorial oversight, and many thanks to our on the ground Atlanta crew, Ben Bowland, Corey Oliver, and Noel Brown. The Underside of Power is performed by Algiers Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at afro Punk

When I was in my twenties, I moved to New York City on a whim. I didn't have much money, and I was more or less squatting an empty apartment. I slept on an air mattress on a tile floor, and I barely knew anyone. On the way to my third day of a brand new job, I got sick on the subway platform. A stranger rubbed my back and held my hair. Do you think you might be pregnant, honey, she asked in a hushed tone. A few days later, I took the subway to a clinic. I didn't tell anybody, and I went alone. On the cab ride back to my apartment, I was feeling really weak and could barely move. The driver double parked and helped me make it up the four flights of stairs to my apartment. He helped me inside. I crawled into bed with all my clothes on, and cried and cried for what seemed like hours. I've never felt more ashamed or alone, but I wasn't alone. You're listening to afrop Punk Solution Sessions. I'm your host Brigittad, and I'm your co host Eve Jeff co acro Punk is a safe place, a blank space to freak out in, to construct a new reality, to live our lives as we see fit, or making sense of the world around us. Here at Afro Punk, we have the conversations that matter to us, conversations that lead to solutions. On today's episode, we're talking about what reproductive justice looks like for us. The right to have a baby, the right to raise that baby in a safe community, the right to not have a baby if you don't want to, the right to access information about your own body and health to make informed choices. The right to not have anything done to your body without your consent. And when you were started, they let you do it. You can do anything whatever you want. We talk a lot about reproductive rights, but too often those conversations center white, middle class women. Here's activists and writer MICHAELA Angela Davis after a Punk Solution sessions in Atlanta. I have a whole different relationship to plan parenthood as right, like it was CECIL and it was Pink Hats, that representative organization that most of us needed. So that trying to kind of close that fissure of the separation of these big national movements and US and like what I said at the Women's March for black women, like all this hair can't get up under pink pussy hats, right, So, and also these are symbols that black women don't resonate with. I don't resonate with a pussy hat, I don't resonate with a slut walk, right So part of that also kind of excludes us just by them symbolism like we wear like black berets and leathern jacksons ship when we haven't a you know, a revolution, like we're gonna become fly. While working at Planned Parenthood, I saw the ways that folks that the margins have not always been included, affirmed and centered and conversations around feminism, particularly when it comes to reproductive rights. White women are not the only women who should be involved in conversations around sexual health, and too often our black, trans, queer and non binary people are left out of the conversation entirely. And this is a problem. We live in a country where one in three trans people and forty percent of trans men have delayed or avoided preventative healthcare like pelvic exams or s t I screenings out of fear of discrimination or disrespect. Folks at the margins are disproportionately impacted by sexual and reproductive health disparities, and when it comes to reproductive healthcare for LGBTQ folks, the word care can be kind of a misnomer. Participating in the American healthcare system can mean going to beat with anti blackness, antiqueer miss miseducation, and just straight up ignorance. Good care care that recognizes and respects the needs of black, gender nonconforming intersects and trance people isn't always affordable or accessible, if it's even an option at all. While accepting an award on behalf of Martin Luther King in n Credit, Scott King said that Black communities have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern. She was right, which is by centering Black communities and conversations about reproductive health is so important and something that Monica Simpson talked about Atlanta Afropunk Solution sessions. Black women are dying at a rate four times higher than white women and childbirth. That means in terms of us like being able to like give birth to children, bringing more children into this world. We are dying at a rate four times higher than white women and childbirth in the South. In some cities like New York, the statistics are worse, where black women are dying at a rate twelve times higher than white women in childbirth. Black women are only making sixty four cents on a dollar to take care of themselves their families. Black women are being criminalized for pregnancy. They're being criminalized for standing up against domestic violence. Black women are dealing with a broken immigration system that's tearing apart our families, that's making it difficult for us to be able to build the types of family structures that we want in this country and where that we deserve. When black women organizers realize their concerns are being ignored by the abortion rights movement, they created the concept of reproductive justice. Black women created reproductive justice because we understood that our lives are inextricably linked from the very real issues that we all face. So these women are were standing standing on our ancestors, their shoulders, our ancestors that were stolen from our land and brought here, our ancestors that learn how to pack themselves with her to rib their bodies of the slave master's child, our ancestors whose bodies were used coercively, and whose bodies were used and violated. And so as we have these conversations, as we are all working tirelessly in this movement towards Black liberation, we can't do that and forget our wounds. We can't do that and forget about the future generations that will come through them. We cannot forget about the fact that our sexual identities, our sexual orientations, our gender, all of that needs to be centered and not moved to the margins. Monica Simpson is the current executive director of Sister Song in Atlanta, a collective that works to improve institutional policies and systems that impacts the reproductive lives of marginalized communities in the South. At Afropunk Solution Sessions in Atlanta, Monica explained that reproductive justice is as much about what's happening inside our wombs as what's going on outside of them. If you have a child, it should be your right to raise that child in an environment free from police violence, environmental injustice, and economic injustice. Reproductive justice is that connecting factor in a world where white supremacy tells us that we were not meant to survive in a world where white supremacy tells us that we don't deserve a future. Reproductive justice is answered to that is, yes we do, and black women will continue to lead that work in connection with our other sisters, to make sure that we see the other side. If you live in a community where you can't raise a child without fearing that shall be killed by police or gun violence, then you aren't truly able to exercise reproductive freedom, which is why police violence is a reproductive justice issue. I hold onto my own wom when I think about what does it mean to give birth to a black baby in this world today? What does it mean for that black baby to come through this Southern queer black body that's now over the age of thirty five and so I'm considered geriatric. What does it mean when I think about and I see the faces of my nephews Andrew and Luke and Demonte and think about them growing up as little black boys in this country. I think about Trayvon Martin's mom. I think about Mike Brown's mother. I think about Jordan David's mother. I think about Ayana Stanley's family. I want all of you to know Sandy was more than a hashtag. That's what I want everybody to know. Sandra Bland was more than a hashtag, and we will continue fighting for justice for her. I even wonder sometime if Sandra Bland was still with us today, would you want to have children or not? We'll have more solution sessions after this quick break. When it comes to abortion, Black women are specifically shamed for our choices. If we terminated pregnancy, were shamed. If you bring a child into the world before we're able to support her, were labeled welfare queens. We can't win. In two thousand and ten, right here in Atlanta that we're billboards that went up in this community that said the most dangerous place for an African American child is in the mother's womb. This billboard campaign stretched all across the country, shaming Black women for their reproductive decision making, shaming us, saying that we were committing genocide on our own communities because we were deciding not to have children to end our pregnancies. When this billboard hit, black women doing reproductive justice work gathered together and said that it was time for a united response, that we would not sit silent to any attack against our reproductive freedom, any attack against our lives, we aren't just shamed from our own communities, from public policy and laws as well. Just look at the recent attacks on reproductive health both here and abroad. On his first day in office, Trump reinstated the global Gag rule, meaning global health workers overseas cannot talk about abortion or offer abortion related information, referrals, or services if they the federal funding. Make no mistake, Black and brown women and girls will die because of this rule and here in the United States, or legislation like Trump's pushed to roll back birth control coverage and the push for twenty week abortion bands keep Black women from being in control of our own bodies. These attacks on our reproductive health aren't just political, their attacks on our agency. At Afropunk Solution sessions in Atlanta, Planned Parenthood director of public Engagement Ellensia Johnson called this out. I tell people all the time that this fight around agency, especially for black women. For me and I can say this is I'm Black. They don't want us having babies anymore because we're not free labor, right Like, I'm not giving birth to free labor anymore. So what's the point of you having me having agency over my body to give birth to a child that I want to live in a functioning society where they're safe and they don't die when they're young. Right. I think with the twenty week abortion band, it is so stigmatizing and criminalizing for women, particularly women of color, are particularly low income women. Because I want to contextualize it a little bit, majority of women who seek an abortion after twenty weeks it is because of the life of the mother or the child or both is in danger or and then what is happening back to Dorian's question of what's happening in the States while they have these waiting periods for folks if they go and they say they want to have an abortion, so you might have a four d eight hour ten seven two hour waiting period. Well, if you are a low income woman, or if you have multiple kids and you don't have childcare, you don't have a job where you can take off multiple days, or you don't have a car or the money or the resources to drive a hundred miles. You can't go somewhere and then go home and then take more days off. But guess what happens. Then you're continuing to delay a pregnancy. So while you have decided, you made this decision about your body, maybe like ten weeks in because of all these laws, of these restrictive laws, your past twenty weeks right, And so they've created and they being the opposition, this very white leg conservative movement, who I don't think our Christians. My daddy is a pastor and supports women's agency. They co opted Jesus. They are over here, they have They are over here telling women that we cannot make the best decisions for our lives and that for some reason there's something wrong with us for making a very difficult decision. When you've got into twenty weeks, that is a very difficult decision. I have friends that that's that's actually happened too. And so I think the push back on these attacks, you have the people in d C, the political folks, advocate folks who are doing their work. But I need black women, especially to come forward and tell stories. Gabby saying, I used to work at Playing Parenthood Together. Her work involves talking to black women about shame to health, de stigmatized conversations around abortion, sexuality, and reproductive health. Growing up in the church, in a very conservative church, we were allowed to wear makeup. We were told we're in makeup. Wasn't what she it right, And so I didn't wear makeup, and Ton was about five years old. At first I didn't know how, and I still don't know how. But second it was something that I was taught. I had big lips. They said, you have big lips. You don't need to emphasize your big lips anymore. I was born with hips in a big, old fat ass, and it just has been here my entire life, and I was taught that you need to cover it up right. I didn't wear short skirts, I didn't wear things that hung to my hips because I was taught very early on that I should be ashamed of my body. So, in thinking about stigma and shame, it would be great for you all just to tell us a short story about shame and how it showed up in your life and how you overcome it um and and advice that you give other young people, young women in particular, about overcoming the stigmas that hold us down. Here was Jessica Bird at Atlanta Afro Punk Solution Sessions. My aunt told me at a very young age that I was frisky, right, and it messed me up for a very long time because I felt so much shame and so that she was like, because I was out there in my glory, honey, I used to love to, you know, walk in my dresses and I would be all in front of everybody. I just love to be a bit of an exhibitionist. And she's like, but you're frisky, and so I would. I held onto that and it made me really really like just shrink inside of myself, like I cannot stand and walk in my fullness. And I carried that with me through my adolescence where I started having sex at a very young age. Right again, I grew up in this small rural town and that's not a lot to do, but we figured out you could do it very easily, you know, in the South. So I did, you know, and my other friends were doing it, and we were having lots of sex, but nobody was helping to educate us on like what that meant, and so we felt like we had to keep this really silent. And then when someone ended up pregnant, then they were shamed for it. But I'm like, what you all were not even providing a space for us to talk about what our bodies are doing and like all these things that's running through us. I want to have sex, I think anyway, I don't know, right, But those conversations um but became very shaming because nobody to have the conversation about six. It's not just our sexualities or lips or booties that make us feel shame. Sometimes it's what's happening inside our bodies too. So how many people know what fibroids are. That's Tanka Gray val Brine and she's talking about her experiences with benign gross on her uterus called fibroids. She had twenty seven fibroids removed from her uterus. One in every five women has fibroids. Million women between the ages of fifteen and fifty will have them. They're incredibly common in black bodies, yet they're not really talked about. Janika says she's never worn a white dress in her life because she constantly worries about the hemorrhaging that her condition causes. She started the White Dress Project so women with fribroids wouldn't have to suffer in silence. But for Chanika, her story really begins with her mom. She was born um in Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica to a teacher named Aina and mechanic name Alvin and growing up on the land in Jamaica. Growing up on the farm, we had many, many health discussions in our family. UM. I can give you remedies and concoctions of mint tea and ginger tea and seracy tea and molasses and yes, yes, anything that you need, UM to be cured from headaches too, ankle sprains. I seriously have it me my grandmother, UM, because that's the type of family we were raised in. Pharmaceuticals weren't always available to us, so it was important to figure out how to live off the land and to basically cure ourselves naturally. UM. So when my mother started to share her thoughts on fibroids and her journey with fibroids with me, UM, it was very devastating to me. At age, my mom lost her first set of twins due to fibroids. And for those of you who might not understand that, because fibroids grow in the same area UM that a baby grows, basically it's fibroids or the baby, and in my mom's situation, the fibroids suffocated the baby be so she lost her first set of twins, and then she got pregnant with me, and I was an only child and I made it and I'm still an only child. So she got excited and got pregnant again and lost a set of twins after me. And through that, I learned that there is so much power in the patient story. You don't have to be experiencing fibroids, but you can have Another ailment that we're not talking about is women. I don't know about the women in the audience, but I know that I was taught to be classy, sophisticated. You don't talk about issues below the belt. You're a woman. You have your period, you bleed, get over it. But I realized that there is no way that you can be hemorrhaging the way that fibroids causes you to hemorrhage. That you can have the pelvic pressure and pain that you do and you not speak up for yourself. If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you've enjoyed it through a Neil Hurston once wrote, as black women, we've been talked to be silent about our pain, a phenomena nots on one Solution Sessions panelist. You know, you grow up in a home as a female, and you are taught to be demure and respectful and subservient. You know, I grew up in a home where I got my period and the only conversation that happened was don't let a boy touch you. That doesn't really take you very far. And it starts at home, right, It starts with you being able to have a good sense of who you are as a woman and be able to appreciate and and really uplift yourself and and your body. And so if we don't start having these types of conversations to normalize what it is that our body is naturally doing, this is part of like the stigma that's associated with why you're told not to wear white, why you're told, um, you know, you don't want anyone to see you. What why you're told not to talk about having your period. For the men in the room, we have periods. Y'all know that it's a thing. It's a bodily function, it's a human function, and so it's okay to talk about it. Black women are supposed to be strong. Just look at the black women we see on TV. Society tells us that we're expected to shoulder not just our burdens, but the burdens of everyone else as well. As a black woman. I just have two things I want to say about last night's selection. You're welcome. While all of America was on the edge of their seats waiting to see if an accused pedophile would get into the United States Senate, of black women in Alabama voted for the other guy, because, as my dad says, black women laugh and joke, but we don't play. The women who saved us last night were just regular black women. They were black women in Alabama. Do you know what they have to go through every day? Those women woke up yesterday and we're like, I gotta deal with systemic racism, that gender pay gap, the school to prison pipeline humidity, and now y'all want me to save a merriment. There will be more solution sessions after this quick break. Doctors don't even take our pain as seriously as they do our white counterparts. But black women do feel pain, and masking up as what clinical psychologist Jazz Keys calls black superwomen, is killing us. You know her because you've seen her so many times. She's bold, fierce and unflinching, seemingly invincible black lady. But you got me twisted, O G. I'm always going to eat. In media, you can hear the idea that the black woman being the superwoman of the caricature isn't only used to shape fictional personalities in pop culture, it's also a standard to which society holds all African American women. And it is that mindset that has passed down to African American girls and women from generation to generation. But there's a problem. I don't think it's very sustainable at all. And if it is sustainable, if a person survives living this way, we would need to take a really good look at their health. A new study finds African American patients are often treated differently when it comes to medicine and care. The survey of more than five hundred people, four hundred of the medical students found implicit bias exists that may help explain why black people are sometimes undertreated for pain. Among its findings, medical students believe that African Americans felt less pain than white patients and even thought their skin was thicker. Dorothy Roberts is a medical problem or a sociological problem. It's both. I think what's really important and fascinating about the study is that it for the first time links what we've long known is under treatment of pain for black patients with doctors, or at least medical students, false beliefs about biological differences based on race. I think you see it everywhere. I think you see it when you look at the kinds of black women that become pop culture figures. Think about women who seem very strong and together, who don't seem to show cracks. You know, there's this writer Tiffany Doofu who talks about the first time that her daughter saw her cry and that she said, Mom, I didn't think that you felt things like that. I didn't think that you cried, and how shocking that was for her that she had created an environment where her daughter, who was also a young black woman, thought that her own mother didn't experience normal emotions because that's just the environment that she established in her household. I think we do carry a lot of burdens, and we do so silently, because you know, when you're a black woman, there is so much of a burden to have it all together, be polished and perfect, lest somebody think that you're not a good representative of your of your race and gender. We deal with so much misogyn or, and I think that's a function of of why we feel the need to pretend to be so strong all the time. Right. Not only is it it's something that it's been stigmatized in Black women, it's something that has been forced upon to us by the health care system. So I remember there was this time when I had a panic attack one night when I was in college, and I couldn't breathe. So I was just like, you know, I don't know if this is a this is connected to the panic attack or not, but I really feel like I can't breathe right now, you know. It was really really freaking out, and so I had to be rushed to the e R. And I got to the e R. And after waiting in the e R, we know how slowly they move and how inefficient it can be. After waiting in the er for hours and having an I V in my arm and not being able to be in the room, I finally got to the doctor and in our three minute five minute conversation, the conclusion that he came to was that I had anxiety and that was without doing any sort of testing, without putting out any other sort of suggestions for what could be wrong with me before the conclusion was that I had anxiety because of things that were going on in my life. You know that that just really manifested in physical property. And after going to other doctors, of course, where I landed was going to a black woman doctor who diagnosed me with an actual condition, which was like inflammation of my esophagus. So it wasn't anxiety at all. It wasn't anxiety at all. I mean, part of me feels it sucks that you did not get the proper diagnosis. Part of me surprised you got a diagnosis at all. I've seen that situation play out where it's it's in your head, go home, stop googling things, You're fine. And the thing about it is it's a form of gas lighting. And for me, I was like, well, maybe this is anxiety because there is ship going on in my life that could possibly manifest in something like a panic attack. It was a conflation of the two. Even though I actually did have a panic attack, and maybe those sort of things can manifest in something like a panic attack, that doesn't mean that I wasn't actually going through a different condition. Yeah, you know, we see these stories time and time again, particularly for folks who are marginalized, who just have the medical care industry take our pain and our issues, see bviously, because they really don't. And that just goes to show the importance of what folks like Allencia and Michaela say that we need to learn how to advocate for each other and ourselves because a lot of times the medical community is not here for us, and we need to take our health into our own hands. At Atlanta Afro Punk Solution Sessions, Michaela Angela Davis spoke to this need for Black women to suffer in silence. Black women will suffer and hold on to pain and and sug through when we're bleeding for a month. If you all can relate to that, just click your fingers say amen. But that I mean, I think that's something that um, we've also been taught that we we are supposed to hold burden and that we are supposed to contain pain, and that we and this is a trope that has been taught to everyone that black women can just take it. And so the fact that you're coming into e Er with five boys because you've been bleeding for Like, that's that's a problem. So what do we do? How do we get to a place where we can talk about our bodies without that isolating stigma and shame. Michaelis says that one way is to find strength and the power of sisterhood and centering black women. Well, this is part of it, right, like making sure that we stay in sisterhood no matter where we are, whether it's at a festival, whether it's at our you know, kitchen tables. But for me, me personally, this whole resistance movement, for me has become I'm resisting doing white folks work right and really focusing in on us right and vote and hyper focusing on Black women and how to um not just center them, but to amplify them. And we have these tools in our hands that lets us see each other in numbers, in in in quality, quantity. So I'm really asking all of you all who are here, use your use your platform, use your phone to say that you were here, say that you're here with your sister, say that that you support your sister. And I don't know, maybe I'm going crazy, me listen, like this is really the only way that I can survive this moment is with inside of sisterhood. That to me is the antidote to patriarchy, right That to me is the antidote to white supremacy, and it's the thing that we've been cultured to avoid. And we can use that power to make sure that we're standing up for each other's health and well being because we're all we got. We don't have to suffer in silence, and you're not alone. I believe the sisterhood is a superpower. So part of maybe what we can do today is commit to supporting each other into making that appointment. Because also we are also I think conditioned to believe that we have to do everything by ourselves. And we can do things for ourselves, but not by ourselves. So it's somebody is anybody here with a girlfriend like your homie. So you turn to your girlfriend right now and make a commitment to supporting her into going to get her jack up and you all can go together. We need to squat up right for everything in particulous because I just learned a bunch of stuff. Olyncia says, we can't expect black women to be strong all the damn time. We feel pain, we get tired, we need time to heal. Let's change the narrative that says otherwise. Well, we have to also be honest that like, it's time for everybody to stand with black women and stop coming to us to fix everything. Somebody let us heal and and so we you'll see some some posters around here that stand with black women. Uh, these shirts and posters that we have out here, it was a black woman who designed those four plane parenthood and we were like, we need something that's actually black women censored. And guess what, We're gonna get a black woman to do it, because it's time for folks to stand with us, but also let us lead. But also if I'm tired, let me be tired, let me be come stand forwards while we're taking it. Yeah, nobody should get to define the boundaries and borders of our own bodies but us. When I think back to my time in that clinic, I felt so alone, but I wasn't. I was there with the legacy of all the black women who came before me and helped make space for me to make choices about my own body. Had I decided to have a child, These same women bought for my ability to parent that child safely. We have to support each other and affirm our rights to govern our own bodies and our right to make safe, healthy and informed choices about our experiences. Because if we don't fight for each other and ourselves, no one else will. What's the solution? Bridget Center black and queer people and conversations about reproductive justice. What's the solution, Bridget, Don't be afraid to speak up about how you feel. What's the solution, Bridget? Take care of each other. What's the solution? Bridget Buck stigma and fuck shame? Yeah. M afrop Punk Solution Sessions is a co production between Afro Punk and How Stuff Works. Your hosts are Bridget Todd and Eve's Jeff Cope. Executive co producers are Julie Douglas, Jocelyn Cooper, and Kuan latif Hill. Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and Kathleen Quillian is audio engineer. Many many thanks to Casey Pegram and Annie Reese for their production and editorial oversight, and many thanks to our on the ground Atlanta crew, Ben Bowland, Corey Oliver, and Noel Brown. The Underside of Power is performed by Algiers Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at afro Punk