#Black Fibroid Specialist Atlanta

[hope-for-olicity]

After a while, the true-life horror stories women tell about their struggles to get reproductive health care start to bleed together. They almost always feature some variation on the same character: the doctor who waves a hand and says, “You’ll be fine,” or “That’s just in your head,” or “Take a Tylenol.” They follow an ominous three-act structure, in which a woman expresses concern about a sexual or reproductive issue to a doctor; the doctor demurs; later, after either an obstacle course of doctor visits or a nightmare scenario coming to life, a physician at last acknowledges her pain was real and present the whole time. Sometimes there’s a quietly gloomy boyfriend or husband in a secondary-character role, frustrated by the strain his partner’s health issue is putting on their intimacy.

That many women have stories of medical practitioners dismissing, misdiagnosing, or cluelessly shrugging at their pain is, unfortunately, nothing new. Research cited in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics in 2001, for example, indicated that women get prescribed less pain medication than men after identical procedures (controlling for body size), are less likely to be admitted to hospitals and receive stress tests when they complain of chest pain, and are significantly more likely than men to be “undertreated” for pain by doctors. And there’s a multi-million dollar industry of questionable alternative health remedies that was arguably built at least in part on a history of doctors being dismissive toward women’s bodily health.

But in 2018, these stories of neglect and unhelpfulness within women’s health care, especially women’s sexual and reproductive health care, are bubbling up to the surface—being documented, circulated, and acknowledged by public discourse—in curious abundance.

It started early in the year. In January, a widely cited Vogue cover story on the tennis great Serena Williams, who gave birth to a daughter in September of 2017, told the harrowing tale of how Williams had to urgently insist to the hospital staff in her recovery room that what she was experiencing after her C-section was a pulmonary embolism in order to get the treatment she needed to stay alive. “The nurse thought her pain medicine might be making her confused,” the story reads. A month later, Vogue published an essay by the Girlscreator Lena Dunham on her choice to have a hysterectomy at age 31 to end her struggle with what she understood to be endometriosis. “I had to work so hard to have my pain acknowledged,” she writes. “And while I’ve been battling endometriosis for a decade and this will be my ninth surgical procedure, no doctor has ever confirmed this for me.” After her uterus is removed and she wakes up in a recovery room, she writes, the doctors are eager to tell her she was right: her uterus is “worse than anyone could have imagined.”

Then, in April, The New York Times published Linda Villarosa’s revealing reporton the dangerous endeavor of being black and pregnant in America, a phenomenon partly attributed to medical practitioners’ “dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms.” The story’s primary character, 23-year-old New Orleans mother of two, Simone Landrum, recalls being told by a doctor to calm down and take Tylenol when she complained of headaches during a particularly exhausting pregnancy; those headaches were later found to be caused by pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy complication that causes high blood pressure and can result in the placenta separating from the uterus before the baby is born. This happened to Landrum, and her pregnancy ended in a stillbirth.

The stories kept coming. Netflix’s The Bleeding Edge, a documentary released last month, is primarily about the poor testing of many medical devices on the market, but it nonetheless also functions as an indictment of carelessness toward women’s health at the regulatory-body level. Three of the four primary narratives  are about medical devices hastily approved by the FDA and marketed to women as safe, easy solutions for fertility- and childbirth-related issues. One prominently featured woman whose medical device—the birth-control implant Essure—lands her in the hospital so many times she loses her job, her home, and her kids over the course of the documentary, recalls being told by a doctor that her abnormally heavy, persistent vaginal bleeding after its insertion is “because she’s Latina” and that her problems are all in her head.

The new KCRW podcast Bodies, a series about medical mysteries in women’s health that launched in July, kicked off its run with the story of a woman in her twenties who experiences deep, burning pain during sex and is initially told by a doctor that nothing’s wrong, lots of women have pain during sex, and that she should just wait and it’ll probably go away. After getting a referral for a specialist from a friend who visited 20 doctors over the course of  seven years before getting a diagnosis, she’s diagnosed with and successfully treated for a type of vulvodynia—which the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecologydescribes as “common” (though “rarely diagnosed”).

Sasha Ottey calls this phenomenon “health-care gaslighting.” Ottey founded the Atlanta-based nonprofit PCOS Challenge: The National Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Association in 2009 to raise awareness of PCOS, a hormonal disorder affecting the ovaries that’s often linked to infertility, diabetes, and pelvic pain. Despite the fact that PCOS was first identified and researched in 1935 and the CDC has estimated it affects some 6 to 12 percent of adult women in the United States, many doctors still don’t recognize the symptoms. Women with PCOS and similar conditions like endometriosis and uterine fibroids, Ottey says, “have been told to suffer in silence.” Additionally, because PCOS often causes obesity or weight problems, many women with PCOS experience not just sexism but what Ottey calls “weight bias” in the health-care system. “Many women and young girls are told, ‘Oh, it's all in your head. Just eat less and exercise more,’” says Ottey, who herself recalls being initially instructed by an endocrinologist to lose weight and come back in six months. “People who are following an eating plan and present their diaries to their physicians or nutritionists will be told, ‘You left something off. You're lying. You're not doing enough.’”

Ottey, who spearheaded the PCOS Challenge’s first-ever day of advocacy on Capitol Hill in May, has noted the recent shift in how—and where—women talk about their struggles getting the sexual and reproductive health care they need. “We're at a critical juncture in women's health, where women are now feeling more empowered to speak up. Because frankly, we're frustrated,” she says. “We're frustrated with the type of care that we've gotten. We're frustrated that it sometimes takes someone decades to get a diagnosis. It's been a year, or a few years, of being empowered and emboldened."

Katherine Sherif, an internist at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and the director of the hospital’s women’s primary care unit, says she hears “day in and day out” from patients “about how they are not listened to [by other doctors], how they’re blown off, how a clue was missed.” Sherif believes most of the minimization of women’s health concerns is “unconscious” on the part of both male and female doctors, but blames general societal sexism for the gaps in women’s sexual and reproductive health care. Men with sexual and reproductive dysfunction have to fight for the care they need sometimes too, she points out, but “to a lesser extent” from what she’s seen.

In her 23 years practicing medicine, Sherif has received a lot of thank-you notes from women she’s treated—and “they don’t say ‘Thank you for saving my life’ or ‘Thank you for that great diagnosis,’” she says. “They say, ‘Thank you for listening to me.’ Or ‘I know we couldn’t get to the bottom of it, but thank you for being there.’” So Sherif sees a common theme in the recent flurry of high-profile expressions of disappointment in women’s reproductive health care, feminist protests against President Donald Trump, and the #MeToo movement: All three, she says, result from women feeling that their complaints, concerns, and objections aren’t being listened to.

“Perhaps it parallels what’s changing in our society,” Sherif says. “When we shine a light in those dirty, dark corners, I think it may give us courage to shed light on other things.”

Ottey, meanwhile, believes women’s increasing candor about their health- and health care-related frustrations can be traced back to the advent of social media. Ottey describes her own struggle to finally get a diagnosis and a treatment plan for PCOS in 2008 as one that made her feel “absolutely alone,” but in the years since, she says, she’s seen women with similar conditions and complaints find and support each other on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “Women see other women, and other girls, speaking up,” she says.

Ottey’s social-media strength-in-numbers theory is borne out in The Bleeding Edge, too: Women whose health deteriorated after getting the Essure birth-control device implanted eventually created an advocacy campaign after finding each other through a Facebook group launched in 2011. Thirty-five thousand women had joined by the time The Bleeding Edge was filmed.

Angie Firmalino, the Facebook group’s founder, remembers being surprised at how many women quickly joined the group, despite it being a project she’d started just so she could warn her female friends about the device. “We became a support group for each other,” Firmalino says, as a montage of selfie videos women have posted to the group page play onscreen. “The day I was implanted, I left the hospital and I was in pain,” says one woman. “They told me to take some ibuprofen and it’ll get better,” says another.

When Firmalino researched the process by which Essure was approved for sale and implantation, she found the FDA hearings had been videotaped, but the video company that owned the tapes would only release them to her for several hundred dollars. So she posted on the Facebook group asking for donations to buy the video—clips of which are repurposed in the documentary and account for its most chilling moments. They raised $900 in 15 minutes.

[blacklivematters-blog]

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

Check out https://flipboard.com/@BlkLivesMatter

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

Healthcare is a human right.

No one should be denied the opportunity to see a doctor because of how much money is in their pocket or where they live.

Our loved ones shouldn’t die from easily curable diseases simply because they can’t afford medicine.

Black lives matter.

Why are these controversial statements? Why are we living under an administration that thinks it is politically expedient to rip away our access to basic healthcare?

Yes, denying people access to healthcare is the perfect way to accomplish your goals if your goals include severely restricting the flow of health resources to marginalized communities and pouring gasoline on the flames of white supremacy; making people of color too sick to earn a living, too sick to learn in school and too sick to raise families. But most of all, keep us too sick to challenge illegitimate authority. That’s exactly what we’re up against.

Unfortunately, this tactic isn’t new. During slavery, slave owners frequently offered only the bare minimum of healthcare and food to their enslaved people, keeping them barely healthy enough to work. And when enslaved Black women like Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were forcibly coerced into medical experiments, Black bodies were sacrificed in the name of white women’s health and because white men, feeding their own “scientific” curiosity, also refused to acknowledge that these women felt pain just like anyone else. The bodily violence these Black women experienced was never because anyone actually cared for the health and well being of Black women.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare. In times of terror, like these, one thing we never lost from our ancestors is the necessity to dream. We know how to hold onto the belief that the arc of justice will eventually find its way home – we have to. In all honesty, as a reproductive justice activist, it’s the only way I know how to move forward, despite incredible odds and near constant political, physical, and personal attacks. Even under a friendly presidential administration, access to abortion care and the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare services have been decimated. Several women, particularly women of color, have been thrown in jail and charged with felonies because they needed abortions and couldn’t afford them, and those who were already in jail have been denied access. Our lack of healthcare access and protections is leading to incarceration.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

Like the Movement for Black Lives, the movement for reproductive justice was founded by women of color, and women who believe that everyone, particularly communities of color, deserve high quality, culturally competent and compassionate healthcare, that the freedom to decide when to become a parent and how to grow their families is a basic right and that everyone has the right and ought to have the resources to raise healthy children free from violence, economic coercion and environmental harm.

When it comes to healthcare, abortion, transgender, indigenous and disability rights are the canaries in the coal mine. If you want to see the future of healthcare under this illegitimate administration, all you have to do is see what has happened since 2010 at the state level and who chose to look the other way as our rights were trampled. Access to abortion is barely a right in half of our states: Black people with mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be murdered by, as Marvin Gaye said, “trigger happy police,” the government refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of indigenous people’s land and trans women of color are routinely murdered while our nation ignores their plight. I refuse to accept this. We have the ability to create something else, and are at a turning point where we must or we will perish.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

I choose to imagine a taxpayer-funded health center, founded on the needs of Black women, transgender and nonbinary people and based on the brilliance I’ve already seen across this nation.

As a taxpayer, I want the taxes I pay to reflect my and our nation’s values, and I believe we can find better ways to spend the Department of Defense’s nearly $600 billion budget currently allocated to raze Black and Brown communities around the world. Keeping people healthy and safe feels like the perfect way to do it. With the appropriation of this new budget, we’ll be able to raise the Medicaid reimbursement rate, which is important to ensure more people have access to care. However, my dream health center will take all patients, no matter their ability to pay, immigration status or health condition.

My imagined center will be named after Dr. Joycelyn Elders and will welcome all of you.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders was a fierce pediatrician and the first Black Surgeon General of the United States. During her tenure, Dr. Elders was outspoken on holistic approaches to healthcare, advocated for access to comprehensive sexual health education, called out racist health textbooks, advocated for abortion access and contraception in schools and famously supported teaching masturbation; a bold and unapologetic Black namesake for a brazen and dynamic dream health center.

The Elders Center will be located conveniently near public transportation. Inspired by the practical support program at ACCESS Women’s Health Justice in California, the Elders Center will also offer funding and complimentary rides on the Diane Nash rides program for those who need assistance arriving at their appointments When patients enter the Elders Center, they’ll be welcomed into an open space decorated by brightly colored furniture and painted walls, much like the Queens, New York, Planned Parenthood. Modeled after the Whole Woman’s Health abortion clinics, patient rooms will be named after Black feminist leaders like Harriet Tubman, Coretta Scott King and Ida B. Wells and inscribed with inspirational quotes by women such as Audre Lorde, Patti LaBelle and Sojourner Truth.

The Melissa Harris Perry wing of the center will offer abortion, birthing and delivery, miscarriage management, adoption, egg freezing, surrogacy and infertility services all on the same floor. There will be no need to stigmatize or arbitrarily separate people. Midwives and doulas will be on hand for all pregnant people who want them. Elders Center staff will thoughtfully advise patients with uterine fibroids and offer holistic approaches to treatment, while maintaining fertility as patients desire. Like the Birthing Center of Buffalo / Buffalo WomenServices, the providers will be there for patients no matter what decision they make about their pregnancies. Lactation specialists on the Ella Baker floor will ensure everyone who would like to chestfeed their child has the education and tools to do so, including trans and nonbinary people.

Because it’s important that we treat whole people and not just their body parts, the Carlett A. Brown wing will offer reproductive healthcare services for people of all genders – everything from contraception and Pap smears to hormones and fertility preservation – similar to the Allentown Women’s Center in Pennsylvania. And because of the deep racial disparities in cancer diagnosis and treatment availability, particularly breast cancer, the Pauli Murray cancer ward will offer state-of-the-art screening and treatment. Inspired by SisterLove in Atlanta, the Alvin Ailey program will run a community bus that offers HIV testing, medication delivery and weekly support peer-led groups.

The Elders Center will also have a resource center for all pregnancy options, including a diaper bank, condoms, an abortion fund and counselors, like the All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center in Bloomington, Indiana. The Claudette Colvin program will engage young parents in policy efforts, and offer baby showers, childcare, postpartum support groups and pregnancy photoshoots to break stigma like the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco. The Josephine Baker program will run support groups and activities for adoptive families, and the Marsha P. Johnson program will run them for transgender folks and their loved ones.

The Elders Center will run a number of counseling and resource programs, as well, to address historic issues and issues currently impacting Black communities. Counselors will be on hand in the Fannie Lou Hamer room to sit with patients who have been forcibly sterilized, and in the Rosa Parks room for survivors of sexual assault who need time to process their experience. Compassion and listening are key to healing. The Maya Angelou program will offer support and defense for sex workers when harmed by clients and law enforcement, and will ensure they are able to continue to work safely in healthy environments. SisterReach’s faith-based civic engagement programing in Memphis will serve as the structure for the Anna Julia Cooper advocacy program designed to increase voter enrollment, local political education and support for community members to run for office. We need people to be engaged now more than ever.

If we are going to withstand the destructive policies of this incoming administration, we’ll have to be even more creative. Our imaginations and grit will see us through a dark era, just like our ancestors showed they could do in the past and our friends are doing across the nation right now.

As we’re living in this nightmare of an administration, this is the future I’ll be working towards. This is my dream – my plan for resistance.

#BlackFuturesMonth #BlackFuturesMonth17

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/i-dream-healthy-black-futures_us_58b1a80ee4b060480e086615?hlleo4qiz50kb4vx6r

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

If we are going to withstand the destructive policies of this incoming administration, we’ll have to be even more creative. Source

[yes-dal456]

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

Healthcare is a human right.

No one should be denied the opportunity to see a doctor because of how much money is in their pocket or where they live.

Our loved ones shouldn’t die from easily curable diseases simply because they can’t afford medicine.

Black lives matter.

Why are these controversial statements? Why are we living under an administration that thinks it is politically expedient to rip away our access to basic healthcare?

Yes, denying people access to healthcare is the perfect way to accomplish your goals if your goals include severely restricting the flow of health resources to marginalized communities and pouring gasoline on the flames of white supremacy; making people of color too sick to earn a living, too sick to learn in school and too sick to raise families. But most of all, keep us too sick to challenge illegitimate authority. That’s exactly what we’re up against.

Unfortunately, this tactic isn’t new. During slavery, slave owners frequently offered only the bare minimum of healthcare and food to their enslaved people, keeping them barely healthy enough to work. And when enslaved Black women like Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were forcibly coerced into medical experiments, Black bodies were sacrificed in the name of white women’s health and because white men, feeding their own “scientific” curiosity, also refused to acknowledge that these women felt pain just like anyone else. The bodily violence these Black women experienced was never because anyone actually cared for the health and well being of Black women.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

In times of terror, like these, one thing we never lost from our ancestors is the necessity to dream. We know how to hold onto the belief that the arc of justice will eventually find its way home – we have to. In all honesty, as a reproductive justice activist, it’s the only way I know how to move forward, despite incredible odds and near constant political, physical, and personal attacks. Even under a friendly presidential administration, access to abortion care and the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare services have been decimated. Several women, particularly women of color, have been thrown in jail and charged with felonies because they needed abortions and couldn’t afford them, and those who were already in jail have been denied access. Our lack of healthcare access and protections is leading to incarceration.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

Like the Movement for Black Lives, the movement for reproductive justice was founded by women of color, and women who believe that everyone, particularly communities of color, deserve high quality, culturally competent and compassionate healthcare, that the freedom to decide when to become a parent and how to grow their families is a basic right and that everyone has the right and ought to have the resources to raise healthy children free from violence, economic coercion and environmental harm.

When it comes to healthcare, abortion, transgender, indigenous and disability rights are the canaries in the coal mine. If you want to see the future of healthcare under this illegitimate administration, all you have to do is see what has happened since 2010 at the state level and who chose to look the other way as our rights were trampled. Access to abortion is barely a right in half of our states: Black people with mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be murdered by, as Marvin Gaye said, “trigger happy police,” the government refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of indigenous people’s land and trans women of color are routinely murdered while our nation ignores their plight. I refuse to accept this. We have the ability to create something else, and are at a turning point where we must or we will perish.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

I choose to imagine a taxpayer-funded health center, founded on the needs of Black women, transgender and nonbinary people and based on the brilliance I’ve already seen across this nation.

As a taxpayer, I want the taxes I pay to reflect my and our nation’s values, and I believe we can find better ways to spend the Department of Defense’s nearly $600 billion budget currently allocated to raze Black and Brown communities around the world. Keeping people healthy and safe feels like the perfect way to do it. With the appropriation of this new budget, we’ll be able to raise the Medicaid reimbursement rate, which is important to ensure more people have access to care. However, my dream health center will take all patients, no matter their ability to pay, immigration status or health condition.

My imagined center will be named after Dr. Joycelyn Elders and will welcome all of you.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders was a fierce pediatrician and the first Black Surgeon General of the United States. During her tenure, Dr. Elders was outspoken on holistic approaches to healthcare, advocated for access to comprehensive sexual health education, called out racist health textbooks, advocated for abortion access and contraception in schools and famously supported teaching masturbation; a bold and unapologetic Black namesake for a brazen and dynamic dream health center.

The Elders Center will be located conveniently near public transportation. Inspired by the practical support program at ACCESS Women’s Health Justice in California, the Elders Center will also offer funding and complimentary rides on the Diane Nash rides program for those who need assistance arriving at their appointments When patients enter the Elders Center, they’ll be welcomed into an open space decorated by brightly colored furniture and painted walls, much like the Queens, New York, Planned Parenthood. Modeled after the Whole Woman’s Health abortion clinics, patient rooms will be named after Black feminist leaders like Harriet Tubman, Coretta Scott King and Ida B. Wells and inscribed with inspirational quotes by women such as Audre Lorde, Patti LaBelle and Sojourner Truth.

The Melissa Harris Perry wing of the center will offer abortion, birthing and delivery, miscarriage management, adoption, egg freezing, surrogacy and infertility services all on the same floor. There will be no need to stigmatize or arbitrarily separate people. Midwives and doulas will be on hand for all pregnant people who want them. Elders Center staff will thoughtfully advise patients with uterine fibroids and offer holistic approaches to treatment, while maintaining fertility as patients desire. Like the Birthing Center of Buffalo / Buffalo WomenServices, the providers will be there for patients no matter what decision they make about their pregnancies. Lactation specialists on the Ella Baker floor will ensure everyone who would like to chestfeed their child has the education and tools to do so, including trans and nonbinary people.

Because it’s important that we treat whole people and not just their body parts, the Carlett A. Brown wing will offer reproductive healthcare services for people of all genders – everything from contraception and Pap smears to hormones and fertility preservation – similar to the Allentown Women’s Center in Pennsylvania. And because of the deep racial disparities in cancer diagnosis and treatment availability, particularly breast cancer, the Pauli Murray cancer ward will offer state-of-the-art screening and treatment. Inspired by SisterLove in Atlanta, the Alvin Ailey program will run a community bus that offers HIV testing, medication delivery and weekly support peer-led groups.

The Elders Center will also have a resource center for all pregnancy options, including a diaper bank, condoms, an abortion fund and counselors, like the All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center in Bloomington, Indiana. The Claudette Colvin program will engage young parents in policy efforts, and offer baby showers, childcare, postpartum support groups and pregnancy photoshoots to break stigma like the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco. The Josephine Baker program will run support groups and activities for adoptive families, and the Marsha P. Johnson program will run them for transgender folks and their loved ones.

The Elders Center will run a number of counseling and resource programs, as well, to address historic issues and issues currently impacting Black communities. Counselors will be on hand in the Fannie Lou Hamer room to sit with patients who have been forcibly sterilized, and in the Rosa Parks room for survivors of sexual assault who need time to process their experience. Compassion and listening are key to healing. The Maya Angelou program will offer support and defense for sex workers when harmed by clients and law enforcement, and will ensure they are able to continue to work safely in healthy environments. SisterReach’s faith-based civic engagement programing in Memphis will serve as the structure for the Anna Julia Cooper advocacy program designed to increase voter enrollment, local political education and support for community members to run for office. We need people to be engaged now more than ever.

If we are going to withstand the destructive policies of this incoming administration, we’ll have to be even more creative. Our imaginations and grit will see us through a dark era, just like our ancestors showed they could do in the past and our friends are doing across the nation right now.

As we’re living in this nightmare of an administration, this is the future I’ll be working towards. This is my dream – my plan for resistance.

  This post is part of the Black Futures Month blog series brought to you by The Huffington Post and the Black Lives Matter Network. Each day in February, look for a new post exploring cultural and political issues affecting the Black community and examining the impact it will have going forward. For more Black History Month content, check out Black Voices’ ‘We, Too, Are America’ coverage.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2lllgQb from Blogger http://ift.tt/2kWZXs8

[imreviewblog]

I Dream Of Healthy Black Futures

Healthcare is a human right.

No one should be denied the opportunity to see a doctor because of how much money is in their pocket or where they live.

Our loved ones shouldn’t die from easily curable diseases simply because they can’t afford medicine.

Black lives matter.

Why are these controversial statements? Why are we living under an administration that thinks it is politically expedient to rip away our access to basic healthcare?

Yes, denying people access to healthcare is the perfect way to accomplish your goals if your goals include severely restricting the flow of health resources to marginalized communities and pouring gasoline on the flames of white supremacy; making people of color too sick to earn a living, too sick to learn in school and too sick to raise families. But most of all, keep us too sick to challenge illegitimate authority. That’s exactly what we’re up against.

Unfortunately, this tactic isn’t new. During slavery, slave owners frequently offered only the bare minimum of healthcare and food to their enslaved people, keeping them barely healthy enough to work. And when enslaved Black women like Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were forcibly coerced into medical experiments, Black bodies were sacrificed in the name of white women’s health and because white men, feeding their own “scientific” curiosity, also refused to acknowledge that these women felt pain just like anyone else. The bodily violence these Black women experienced was never because anyone actually cared for the health and well being of Black women.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

In times of terror, like these, one thing we never lost from our ancestors is the necessity to dream. We know how to hold onto the belief that the arc of justice will eventually find its way home – we have to. In all honesty, as a reproductive justice activist, it’s the only way I know how to move forward, despite incredible odds and near constant political, physical, and personal attacks. Even under a friendly presidential administration, access to abortion care and the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare services have been decimated. Several women, particularly women of color, have been thrown in jail and charged with felonies because they needed abortions and couldn’t afford them, and those who were already in jail have been denied access. Our lack of healthcare access and protections is leading to incarceration.

It should never be a crime to seek healthcare.

Like the Movement for Black Lives, the movement for reproductive justice was founded by women of color, and women who believe that everyone, particularly communities of color, deserve high quality, culturally competent and compassionate healthcare, that the freedom to decide when to become a parent and how to grow their families is a basic right and that everyone has the right and ought to have the resources to raise healthy children free from violence, economic coercion and environmental harm.

When it comes to healthcare, abortion, transgender, indigenous and disability rights are the canaries in the coal mine. If you want to see the future of healthcare under this illegitimate administration, all you have to do is see what has happened since 2010 at the state level and who chose to look the other way as our rights were trampled. Access to abortion is barely a right in half of our states: Black people with mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be murdered by, as Marvin Gaye said, “trigger happy police,” the government refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of indigenous people’s land and trans women of color are routinely murdered while our nation ignores their plight. I refuse to accept this. We have the ability to create something else, and are at a turning point where we must or we will perish.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

I choose to imagine a taxpayer-funded health center, founded on the needs of Black women, transgender and nonbinary people and based on the brilliance I’ve already seen across this nation.

As a taxpayer, I want the taxes I pay to reflect my and our nation’s values, and I believe we can find better ways to spend the Department of Defense’s nearly $600 billion budget currently allocated to raze Black and Brown communities around the world. Keeping people healthy and safe feels like the perfect way to do it. With the appropriation of this new budget, we’ll be able to raise the Medicaid reimbursement rate, which is important to ensure more people have access to care. However, my dream health center will take all patients, no matter their ability to pay, immigration status or health condition.

My imagined center will be named after Dr. Joycelyn Elders and will welcome all of you.

We have to fantasize about the potential for a future of Black health and Black freedom.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders was a fierce pediatrician and the first Black Surgeon General of the United States. During her tenure, Dr. Elders was outspoken on holistic approaches to healthcare, advocated for access to comprehensive sexual health education, called out racist health textbooks, advocated for abortion access and contraception in schools and famously supported teaching masturbation; a bold and unapologetic Black namesake for a brazen and dynamic dream health center.

The Elders Center will be located conveniently near public transportation. Inspired by the practical support program at ACCESS Women’s Health Justice in California, the Elders Center will also offer funding and complimentary rides on the Diane Nash rides program for those who need assistance arriving at their appointments When patients enter the Elders Center, they’ll be welcomed into an open space decorated by brightly colored furniture and painted walls, much like the Queens, New York, Planned Parenthood. Modeled after the Whole Woman’s Health abortion clinics, patient rooms will be named after Black feminist leaders like Harriet Tubman, Coretta Scott King and Ida B. Wells and inscribed with inspirational quotes by women such as Audre Lorde, Patti LaBelle and Sojourner Truth.

The Melissa Harris Perry wing of the center will offer abortion, birthing and delivery, miscarriage management, adoption, egg freezing, surrogacy and infertility services all on the same floor. There will be no need to stigmatize or arbitrarily separate people. Midwives and doulas will be on hand for all pregnant people who want them. Elders Center staff will thoughtfully advise patients with uterine fibroids and offer holistic approaches to treatment, while maintaining fertility as patients desire. Like the Birthing Center of Buffalo / Buffalo WomenServices, the providers will be there for patients no matter what decision they make about their pregnancies. Lactation specialists on the Ella Baker floor will ensure everyone who would like to chestfeed their child has the education and tools to do so, including trans and nonbinary people.

Because it’s important that we treat whole people and not just their body parts, the Carlett A. Brown wing will offer reproductive healthcare services for people of all genders – everything from contraception and Pap smears to hormones and fertility preservation – similar to the Allentown Women’s Center in Pennsylvania. And because of the deep racial disparities in cancer diagnosis and treatment availability, particularly breast cancer, the Pauli Murray cancer ward will offer state-of-the-art screening and treatment. Inspired by SisterLove in Atlanta, the Alvin Ailey program will run a community bus that offers HIV testing, medication delivery and weekly support peer-led groups.

The Elders Center will also have a resource center for all pregnancy options, including a diaper bank, condoms, an abortion fund and counselors, like the All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center in Bloomington, Indiana. The Claudette Colvin program will engage young parents in policy efforts, and offer baby showers, childcare, postpartum support groups and pregnancy photoshoots to break stigma like the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco. The Josephine Baker program will run support groups and activities for adoptive families, and the Marsha P. Johnson program will run them for transgender folks and their loved ones.

The Elders Center will run a number of counseling and resource programs, as well, to address historic issues and issues currently impacting Black communities. Counselors will be on hand in the Fannie Lou Hamer room to sit with patients who have been forcibly sterilized, and in the Rosa Parks room for survivors of sexual assault who need time to process their experience. Compassion and listening are key to healing. The Maya Angelou program will offer support and defense for sex workers when harmed by clients and law enforcement, and will ensure they are able to continue to work safely in healthy environments. SisterReach’s faith-based civic engagement programing in Memphis will serve as the structure for the Anna Julia Cooper advocacy program designed to increase voter enrollment, local political education and support for community members to run for office. We need people to be engaged now more than ever.

If we are going to withstand the destructive policies of this incoming administration, we’ll have to be even more creative. Our imaginations and grit will see us through a dark era, just like our ancestors showed they could do in the past and our friends are doing across the nation right now.

As we’re living in this nightmare of an administration, this is the future I’ll be working towards. This is my dream – my plan for resistance.

  This post is part of the Black Futures Month blog series brought to you by The Huffington Post and the Black Lives Matter Network. Each day in February, look for a new post exploring cultural and political issues affecting the Black community and examining the impact it will have going forward. For more Black History Month content, check out Black Voices’ ‘We, Too, Are America’ coverage.

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from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2lGNCqN

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