The Connectors. Uniting Medical Care, Activism, and Feminism. Leslie Laurie and the Family Planning Council of Western Massachusetts

Transcription

1 PART FIVE The Connectors Uniting Medical Care, Activism, and Feminism Leslie Laurie and the Family Planning Council of Western Massachusetts Other than the death of Nancy Kierzek from a botched abortion, perhaps the other defining moment of the birth control and abortion movement in the Pioneer Valley was the arrival of Leslie Tarr Laurie in August of A trained community organizer, Laurie met with members of the women s collectives, local doctors, Clergy Consultation Services (CCS), and other groups within weeks of moving to the Amherst area. Laurie had an M.A. in Community Organizing and Planning from Columbia University and had been Director of Education and Outreach for the Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania. She found it appalling that Western Massachusetts had no organized family planning services and set about to solve this. She spent several years as the Western Massachusetts representative for the Boston-based Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, developing programs and independent, government-subsidized family planning clinics in the four counties of Western Massachusetts. In 1973, these clinics were linked and incorporated as a new organization, the Family Planning Council of Western Massachusetts (FPCWM) and Laurie was hired as Executive Director. Renamed Tapestry Health Systems, the organization thrives today with Laurie still at the helm. Laurie s activist nature had been honed during her graduate work at Columbia, an institution whose School of Social Work was well known for putting theory into practice on the streets. Projects rooted at the school in the 1960s helped shape the national War on Poverty s strategy of community-based reform. Leslie and her colleagues

2 222 / Creating Choice at Columbia were immersed in unraveling the government s new initiatives for Medicare, Voting Rights, and the Higher Education Action. Laurie s approach to organizing was further influenced by the Planned Parenthood system, with its emphasis on educational outreach in combination with community clinics. Though she clearly identified as a feminist and believed that reproductive freedom was an essential goal in the women s rights struggle, she believed in a medical approach to fertility care. While at Planned Parenthood in Pennsylvania, Laurie had worked closely with the Clergy Consultation chapter in the area. It was natural, therefore, that she seek out the Western Massachusetts CCS chapters when she arrived. Elaine Fraser, then doing CCS counseling at the United Christian Foundation (UCF) offices at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), remembers that Leslie came to talk with her less than a week after she got to town. Laurie also made contact with those working at the University Health Services and with the abortion counseling group from the Amherst Women s Liberation group. While she was impressed with what each of the groups was doing individually, she could see that they were each limited in their scope CCS appeared to alienate some who were not religious, the University Health Services only served students, and the Abortion and Birth Control (ABC) group tended to focus only on the Amherst and Northampton area. She also understood that each of these groups worked in relative isolation from one another and perceived major differences in their approaches to the issues. Coming in from the outside gave Leslie Laurie a perspective informed by her work and academic training while not entangling her in local cliques or attitudes. It also gave her a larger regional focus, as she looked to fill gaps in service in four Western Massachusetts counties, three of which had no services at all when she arrived. While the Amherst ABC group, for example, might in some ways have been reacting to those men in the clergy, and saw their counseling as a feminist political act, Leslie sought reform rather than revolution. She was willing to work within government and medical structures, adopting and adapting their strategies and networks for her own work while building strategic alliances. Equally skillful in gaining the support of these establishments as well as the support of the women s groups and clergy, she was able to navigate and even negotiate alliances between them. She exercised what one researcher has termed pragmatic radicalism. 1 Moreover, Laurie saw pregnancy counseling as only one piece of a much larger picture of comprehensive family planning; the best way to address the overall family planning needs of the community, she believed, was through the development of reproductive health clinics, especially for poor women. Laurie was aided in her efforts by new Federal Legislation and Funding. As part of the War on Poverty, new and revised government programs, including Medicaid, funded health exams and birth control for poor women in both rural and urban areas. President Richard Nixon s Title X Public Health Act, signed into law in 1970, mandated that no American woman be denied access to family planning assistance

3 The Connectors / 223 because of her economic condition. Title X provided funding for health clinics established according to its set rules for comprehensive family planning, which included providing complete physical exams, family planning counseling, birth control provision, and outreach and educational programs. 2 The Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts (PPLM) used some of its Title X funds to implement reproductive rights education and find partners to start clinical delivery services in Western Massachusetts. PPLM wanted to stay out of the clinic creation business and hoped to use Title X funds to support clinics within existing agencies. Laurie s job was to connect with these agencies and try to build clinic programs within them. Since she worked far from Boston and spent most of her time on the road working with local communities, Laurie was largely free from the constraints of an established bureaucracy and was able to be much more responsive to what was happening locally. It became a community-based effort. Being far from the watchful eye of PPLM headquarters and state government perhaps allowed Laurie and the clinics, once they were established, to take some risks they might not have taken had they been closer to Boston. These risks included giving abortion referrals the names of providers in legal areas like New York most likely came from Laurie s CCS contacts while doing so was still illegal under the Comstock laws in Massachusetts. She began organizing in Berkshire County in 1972 and over the next two years helped establish clinics there and in Hampden and Franklin Counties. In each case, she located a local host organization and created a community advisory group. In this way, the clinics were community projects and not purely the result of an outside organization, Planned Parenthood, or the influence of an outside organizer, Laurie. In August of 1972, she was working on a grant to fund a clinic in her home county, Hampshire, when President Nixon vetoed a bill that would have increased funding for programs, including Title X programs, in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This veto meant that there would be no new grants funded in the area, and thus no money for separate clinics in Hampshire County. Laurie, with funding and consulting aid from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, conceived of a way to expand services into Hampshire County and beyond even while operating under the new funding restraints. She convinced her partner organizations, each of them operating under a separate grant, to turn the grants over to a new, combined, regionalized organization to be called the Family Planning Council of Western Massachusetts. By creating one central location for administrative functions such as billing and scheduling with the clinics operating then as satellite service providers, there would be more money with which to create and offer additional clinics and services. The partner organizations relinquished their individual Title X grants, a new Title X grant was given to the new regional organization, and FPCWM launched on September 1, The organizational headquarters, as well as a new clinic, were opened at 16 Center Street in Northampton, finally bringing services to Hampshire County. Leslie Laurie was hired as the Executive Director, and Merry Boone, who had been in

4 224 / Creating Choice charge of the Franklin County-based family planning clinic at Wesson Women s Hospital, became the Vice President. Ellen Story was soon hired in a clerical role, and within a year had risen to be the Coordinator for Hampshire County services. Ellen Story worked with the Council for 17 years before running successfully for the Massachusetts House of Representatives in She has held that position ever since and serves the Third Hampshire District, which includes Amherst and Granby in Hampshire County. In 1998, the Family Planning Council of Western Massachusetts became Tapestry Health with ten locations throughout the Pioneer Valley. Tapestry Health continues to provide family planning and community health services such as gynecological care, birth control, emergency contraception, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy testing and options counseling. Tapestry also provides a range of other services: HIV/AIDS testing, counseling and education/ prevention outreach programs (including one of four needle exchange programs in Massachusetts), sexuality education outreach programs on contraception, puberty, and AIDS, and a Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) offering food and nutrition services for low-income women and their families. Tapestry Health also works to advocate for health policies at the state and national levels, many times in the person of Leslie Laurie who has continued as Executive Director. In addition to this lobbying work, she has played several high profile roles in the reproductive health care movement and profession, including serving two consecutive terms as President of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, and serving on the Executive Committee and Board of the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Counselors Cooperatives While Leslie Laurie was employed by Planned Parenthood and was organizing for provision of reproductive health services in Western Massachusetts, she was also, on her own time, organizing those people who had already been active in the area around provision of abortion referrals. Laurie s new clinics included or would eventually include options counseling in their work, but rather than compete with the clergy and feminist volunteers who had already been making referals, Leslie tried to unite them. While individual groups like the Springfield Women s Health Collective and the Amherst Women s Liberation s ABC Group and the two Clergy Consultation chapters all individually improved women s access, they did not work together in a focused way until Leslie Laurie organized the Western Massachusetts Counselors Cooperative in The groups Leslie helped to unite had each individually been working both effectively and illegally to secure access to problem pregnancy options. The reproductive

5 The Connectors / 225 rights activities of both the Springfield and Amherst women s collectives were deeply rooted in their commitment to redefining American women s access to information. The women of these organizations fit the pattern recognized by historian Ruth Rosen: Most of the original health advocates were college educated, middle-class and white: women s liberation activists, nurses, a few male doctors and research scientists, all of whom saw their greatest problem as lack of information rather than access to medical care, which was the barrier faced by poor women. 3 The founders of these groups, although generally of a different social class than those they sought to serve, made access to information by poor and minority women a key goal. Leslie Laurie and the Family Planning Council would extend this goal to access to actual local services for poor women. This is not to say that local groups limited their services just to providing education and contact information. The Amherst group established the Lucy Fund to help those who could not pay for abortions and the Springfield members often contributed out of their own pockets. On the UMass campus, students helped establish the Medical Emergency Loan Fund, a thinly veiled abortion loan project. But it took the arrival in the area of an experienced community organizer and reproductive health educator, Leslie Laurie, to create a structure that would allow the various groups to combine their collective strength to the advantage of poor women. The problem pregnancy groups at the Valley Women s Center and Springfield Women s Health Counseling both joined Laurie s Western Massachusetts Counselors Cooperative. Both local chapters of the CCS were also very involved in the Cooperative and Ruth Fessenden, from the UCF chapter, served as co-convener of the group. 4 (Returning the favor, Laurie served as co-chair of UCF s CCS Task Force during 1972.) During this period, Laurie was helping to open family planning clinics throughout the region, and the Counselor s Cooperative statistics provide a good record of this growth. 5 In April 1973, eight groups are listed as part of the Cooperative; by November twelve groups belonged, including the new clinics Leslie had helped to establish. 6 All the groups in the Cooperative shared resources such as the names and information on abortion providers who had been thoroughly checked out and approved. The Western Massachusetts Counselor s Cooperative changed its name to the Western New England Counselor s Cooperative (WNECC) in 1973, reflecting Laurie s effectiveness in uniting counselors throughout the region. While the Cooperative functioned initially as simply a way for counselors to be in touch with each other and share information, it soon evolved into a pressure group by which the various groups could push the New York clinics to discount their services or provide free abortions for indigent women. The groups sent women to local hospitals for therapeutic abortions and to clinics in New York State for legal abortions. After Roe v. Wade went into effect, the Cooperative began referring primarily to two clinics in Springfield and Amherst. The WNECC negotiated deals with the abortion providers, such as for every five patient referred, the sixth would receive their abortion free of charge.

6 226 / Creating Choice In this way, credit was built up with the providers that would allow the clinics to refer indigent women to receive free abortions. The Cooperative also played an essential role in convincing local abortion providers to include the feminist practice of involving female counselors as part of their service. This direct influence of the women s movement upon the health care system survives to this day in many clinics that provide abortion procedures. 7 Through their work with both the FPCWM and the counselors cooperatives, Leslie Laurie and her staff and allies united those who had been working toward reproductive health access during the illegal years and moved them toward sustained access and practice post-roe. In the story of Pioneer Valley reproductive-health work, she and her allies are truly the Connectors.