Marcy Bloom is recipient of the 2006 William O. Douglas Award, the ACLU of Washington’s highest honor. The award is given for outstanding, consistent, and sustained contributions to civil liberties. A courageous advocate for civil liberties, Marcy Bloom has long been a leader in safeguarding the fundamental right to reproductive freedom. Bloom served for 18 years as the executive director and guiding force of the Aradia Women’s Health Center, Seattle’s first nonprofit abortion and gynecological health center, and a model for clinics nationwide.
Her activism spans the history of the reproductive rights movement. Bloom was on the front lines at a time when reproductive rights were not yet protected, helping women to locate safe providers and personally guiding them to states where abortions were legal and accessible. In the decades that followed, she dedicated herself to making health care and reproductive services available to all women.
In addition to her visionary role in shaping Aradia, she stood up to picketing and threats by anti-choice forces, assisted in exam rooms, lobbied the legislature, carried speculums to clinics in Mexico, and sat on the steering committee that oversaw the passage of Initiative 120, Washington’s reproductive freedom law.
She is also now doing U.S. advocacy and capacity building for a Mexico-City based organization GIRE - El Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Elegida/The Information Group on Reproductive Choice. GIRE seeks to decriminalize and destigmatize abortion and works toward the expansion of reproductive justice and respectful, safe reproductive health services for all the women of Latin America.
There are many incredible stories about leaders in the women’s rights movement. This is one of them. Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom is a complex story that is moving, sobering, and should not be missed.
Sarah Diehl’s film skillfully contrasts abortion policies and laws in two countries, revealing how the legal status of women is a direct result of the silencing–or empowering–of women’s voices
Dr. Baird Bardarson of Seattle and Whidbey Island, Washington, was a true champion, pioneer, humanitarian, and heroic abortion provider. His loss cuts very deeply for our community of abortion providers.
Although perhaps not completely shocking to those of us in the reproductive health and justice movement, the encompassing newly published Forsaken Lives: The Harmful Impact of the Philippine Criminal Abortion Ban by the innovative Center for Reproductive Rights is both incredibly powerful and devastating as it discusses in detail “the human suffering caused by the criminal ban on abortion [in the Philippines] and the challenges it creates for health service providers.”
Slightly more than a year ago, so many of us lost so much: a beloved friend, an exceptional human being, a compassionate doctor, a skilled teacher and mentor, and an inspirational role model.
Sometimes the struggle for the reproductive justice and the dignity and freedom of women and girls takes on especially compelling and tragic dimensions. This is one of them.
When we discuss abortion as an honorable and loving choice that helps women to become better mothers in the future, we are showing respect, understanding, and support for the complexity of women’s choices.
What motivates an abortion provider? What brings an individual to this important – and regretfully still controversial – practice of medicine? The answers are as varied as the brave doctors who do the work of helping women.
Parents of special needs children don’t seek to force anyone to parent a disabled child. But they do want to destigmatize Down syndrome and see their children loved and welcomed.
Tragic news of children sickened by poisoned milk in China raises questions not only about its product safety system but about why infants in China are fed formula at all.
