Katie interviews Morgan Hopkins, National Field Manager of All* Above All, a reproductive justice campaign dedicated to lifting bans that deny abortion coverage - so that every woman can get affordable, safe abortion care when she needs it, regardless of her income. Since the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, Congress has withheld coverage for abortion services from women insured through Medicaid and other government insurance programs. Currently, this impacts nearly 29 million women of reproductive age.
Katie and Morgan discuss the history of the Hyde Amendment, how the Hyde Amendment hurts women, what reproductive justice is all about, and the simple steps you can take to help end Hyde.
Katie interviews Nilima Achwal, a leader in systemic thinking for social change. They discuss what the social enterprise sector is getting wrong, how social media and cultural phenomena like #MeToo play a role in changing the world, and how "systemic change" thinking can be applied to create large-scale, transformative social change. In the discussion, Nilima describes the cultural impetus behind her founding of Iesha Learning, the first comprehensive gender and sexuality education program in India. The program, which reached 15,000 classrooms across India, sought to address taboos surrounding gender, menstruation, and sex. Nilima explains the incredible impact of the program, and why the approach of Iesha Learning ultimately did not go far enough to create broad change in the context of gender in India. She provides recommendations for how cultural change initiatives should be undertaken, and some encouragement for those of us feeling weary about the state of our world today.
Katie interviews Zoe Hamilton, a researcher and expert on India’s family planning policies, about the country’s complex relationship with female sterilization and reproductive justice. Zoe and co-director Anne Munger are working in Mumbai on a feature-length documentary called Sterilized, which examines the Indian government's use of sterilization as a means of family planning and population control. In the interview, Katie and Zoe discuss how India's controversial family planning policies affect the lives of women. They examine the political forces - in India and in our own countries - that lead women to have tenuous control over their bodies and choices.