Many of the CEMCH Scholars attended this year’s meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), held in Denver, October 29 – November 2. We will be posting their reflections and highlights this month.
By Mary Lingwall, BA
My second consecutive year attending APHA met and exceeded my expectations. I was pleasantly surprised that in terms of overall tone and messaging, this year’s conference seemed to respond directly to criticisms that I had of last year’s conference.
In particular, I was impressed by the way that women’s rights, reproductive rights, and anti-racism work were all put center stage during the conference, especially during the welcome session. This year’s opening/welcoming session featured a keynote address from Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. I remember vividly that last year’s opening session did not contain any mention of women’s or reproductive rights despite the focus of the conference being health in all policies and the news cycle of fall 2015 being dominated by anti-abortion laws in the majority of American states and the recently released videos libeling Planned Parenthood for fetal tissue donation negotiations. This year’s opening session was a welcome step in the progressive direction toward acknowledging that a person’s access to abortion care is a public health issue. As a former Planned Parenthood Federation of America intern, I was very happy to see Cecile Richards speak to a public health audience and I was proud of having worked with her and for Planned Parenthood. My favorite part of her speech was when she said “the future is feminine” in reference to the great strides that women have been making (like how a woman is about to become our next president!). I think that Cecile meant to say that the “future is female,” which is a popular feminist saying right now (I even have the saying printed on a t-shirt at home!), but I can understand her mistake; she was excited!
The other speakers during the opening session– APHA president Dr. Camara Jones and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper—also openly discussed issues that are coming to the forefront in public health discussions and policy after decades of being hidden under the surface of all of our work: racism and its pernicious and pervasive effect on health and gun violence as a public health issue. It was very inspiring to see these topics being given center stage in such a public way.
The rest of my APHA experience was dedicated to learning more about recent research in abortion access as well as other developments in reproductive health research. One of my favorite sessions presented new findings from University of California San Francisco’s reproductive health think tank Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health’s (ANSIRH) Turnaway Study. The Turnaway Study is a five year cross sectional study of women who received abortion care versus women who were turned away from abortion facilities due to state-sanctioned gestational limits and ended up having children. The study findings highlight the social, economic, and educational limitations imposed on women who are forced to keep unintended pregnancies to term. However, the study also found that women are incredibly resilient despite these limitations and that even the turned away women were able to find happiness and combat negative feelings after the stress of being turned away. But the most important finding of the Turnaway Study is that, contrary to popular rhetoric and anti-choice messaging, women who choose termination do not differ from their turned away counterparts in rates of alcohol use, substance abuse, depression, and feelings of guilt or regret. I think it is important that we get this message out and to the public in order to continue to support women who choose abortion and continue to combat abortion stigma in our culture.
I was also able to attend the Abortion Task Force business meeting at this year’s APHA conference. The most important work we focused on in this meeting was to make sure we were all on the same page in prioritizing ending the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment is a 40 year-old provision that restricts Medicaid funding for abortion care in almost all states.
The final highlight of my 2016 APHA conference was seeing Dr. Willie Parker, MD celebrated at the Population, Reproductive, and Sexual Health section awards ceremony for his outstanding service to women in the south. Dr. Willie Parker is the only abortion provider in Alabama and Mississippi. Dr. Parker has also recently unveiled an abortion fund specifically for women from Alabama and Mississippi; as an avid abortion fund volunteer, I am honored to have gotten to meet Dr. Parker and celebrate his life’s work alongside fellow pro-choice activists and researchers dedicated to making a difference.
Mary Lingwall is a second-year MPH student with a concentration in Maternal and Child Health. In her previous career, Mary was a birth and postpartum doula and lactation counselor. Her interests include perinatal mood disorders, breastfeeding promotion and outreach, and maternal mortality and abortion access in the South. She plans on graduating in May 2017.
