Reproductive health issues are really important to me. Michelle Hartney: For the past seven years, I have been making a lot of work about maternal healthcare issues-covering topics such as the United StatesвЂ™ high maternal mortality rate, postpartum PTSD, obstetric abuse, and how racism and misogyny affect birth outcomes in America. How did you think up this project? What made you decide to work on UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD now? Why this issue, in this moment? Artist and activist Michelle Hartney on Zoom during a fireside chat at The Jane Club about UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD.Д¬armen Rios: I always start with an inception story. This interview has been condensed for length and clarity. It honors the women who wrote the letters, but it also brings in the generations being impacted 100 years later by the same patriarchal laws and restrictions.вЂќД¬lick here to sign up to volunteer and be part of UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD, and keep reading for more from our conversation-which explored current attacks on birth control, the urgency of reckoning with Margaret SangerвЂ™s legacy, and the power of community in the fight for equality. вЂњWorking with women across the country to produce these pieces, to me, is an extension of the goal I have here-to demand that we build a reproductive rights movement big enough for everyone. вЂњI liked the idea of someone re-enacting the moment these women took it upon themselves to get help and try to change their lives, and seek out a way to have some control over their destinies,вЂќ Hartney told me during a fireside chat Wednesday at The Jane Club, a digital community for women that prides itself on supporting mothers. After volunteers hand-write the letters, Hartney will stitch them onto antique wedding dress fabric dyed in dandelion. The letters, from a selection Sanger published in 1928 called Motherhood in Bondage, bring to life the testimony of women who were desperate to control their own destinies. Sign up to help and youвЂ™ll receive a letter-one of 250,000 sent to Margaret Sanger before birth control information was legal to disseminate by law, and access to contraception was even more forbidden. HartneyвЂ™s installation will require the help of hundreds of volunteers from across the country. It also compels us to broaden our focus from attacks on abortion rights to attacks on all forms of family planning-and hold our foremothers accountable for the ways in which they failed to protect and defend everyoneвЂ™s reproductive freedom. It was fitting that artist and activist Michelle Hartney launched UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD on #ThxBirthControl Day: The collaborative textile-based installation connects the dots between historical attacks on birth control access and the contemporary need for an intersectional reproductive justice movement.

Ms project viewer no limits