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Leadership Alliances Come Together for FMF Mid-Atlantic Region Training

On a campus where the Student Health Center does not provide birth control, the MERCER UNIVERSITY Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance is making quite an impact with students! Leadership Alliance activists have distributed 500 condoms on campus and in the process have educated their peers about the lack of access to contraception on campus. Brandi Brown, Mercer FMLA activist, states “we’ve found out that a lot of students who have never needed to go to the health center for birth control didn’t realize that it isn’t available.” In addition, the group is distributing Prescribe Choice materials to educate students on the benefits of emergency contraception and mifepristone.

The new Leadership Alliance affiliate at OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY tabled to educate their campus about the threats to abortion access in judicial appointments and the Supreme Court and showed FMF’s “Never Go Back” video on campus.

The MARIETTA COLLEGE Leadership Alliance organized a letter-writing campaign sending letters targeting their campus paper in support of emergency contraception and against abstinence-only sex education programs. The Campus Newspaper Editor told the group that their letters solicited an unprecedented amount of feedback. The SPELMAN COLLEGE Leadership Alliance will promote reproductive rights during their “FMLA Week,” a week with major events to take place each day during the week of March 25th- March 28, 2002. They’ll kick off the week with a Reproductive Health Fair, where local pro-choice organizations such as the Feminist Women’s Health Center, the Spelman College Health Services, and the Georgia Reproductive Advocacy League will table with resources and information on pro-choice issues. The group also plans to have a table at the fair with information on reproductive rights and a feminist trivia game! The FMLA week will also feature a “Focus on Feminism Training” mandatory for FMLA members considering running for an elected office for next year, a visit to the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, a Feminist Career Fair with various grassroots and social and political activist groups looking to recruit students, an African American Women and Film Symposium, and a feminist convocation on the Socialization of the Spelman Woman. Utilizing a grant from their campus Prevention and Wellness Center, the WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Leadership Alliance hosted a screening of “If These Walls Could Talk” and was featured in their campus paper for promoting the pro-choice message.

The PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY Leadership Alliance is organizing a Conference on Women’s Health and Wellness, March 22-24, 2002. The conference will feature distinguished keynote speakers, including Wendy Sanford, founding member of Boston Women’s Healthbook Collective and original contributor to Our Bodies Ourselves, and Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who won Roe v. Wade. The group has already received campus-wide support for the conference, with diverse co-sponsors that include the Penn State American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Iota Iota Iota, University Student Government Women’s Affairs, Students for Accountability and Reform (STAR), Lamda Delta Omega (LDO).

For more information, email conference organizers at womens_health_conference2002@hotmail.com, or visit their conference website.

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