Reproductive Rights Coalition Wants to Answer Your Questions on Abortion
March is Women’s History Month, but there is still as sharp a focus as ever on one women’s issue that’s never really history: abortion.
The Reproductive Rights Coalition (RRC) is a local nonprofit created by abortion rights supporters to focus on access — to health-care clinics that offer abortion, to information, and to abortion pills — for people with uteri.
Since the Dobbs decision was handed down from the Supreme Court last summer, putting an end to the rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, RRC has seen an increase in patients seeking information, according to volunteer Jennifer Patterson.
The group also offers escort services outside of clinics and works to change legal boundaries and address loopholes that create security risks and vulnerabilities, according to its website.
The RRC regularly holds fundraiser events, which aim not only to raise money and help them support patients, but to answer all questions “no matter how weird, random or embarrassing.”
What is the difference between emergency contraception and regular contraception? Can they use people in comas to have babies? What about sex-selective abortions? What are “fake clinics? Those are just a few sample questions they tossed out in the lead-up to Thursday’s event as totally acceptable one.
The Reproductive Rights Coalition has a fundraiser event planned this Thursday, March 23, at Hi-Wire Brewing in Charlotte’s South End. The event, called Ask Me About Abortion, will be aimed at answering questions without judgment.
“Abortion in North Carolina is tenuous,” said Patterson. “There is a very slim margin of a supermajority and abortion is a voting issue on both sides. The next election will likely be decided by this issue.”
Ask Me About Abortion will begin with a panel composed of women from different backgrounds, including law, business and medicine. Attendees can also drink RRC Lager from Hi-Wire to help raise funds for the organization’s outreach efforts and protests.
Betty Gunz, a retired social worker who almost died from an illegal abortion, is always eager to tell her story.
Gunz recounts how she started to bleed when a pre-Roe at-home procedure she was taking part in went awry. A friend who had driven her to the kitchen where the procedure took place wanted to drop her in a field. Luckily, her boyfriend would not allow that and insisted she be taken to a hospital, where she learned she had contracted sepsis.
Gunz said she was relieved when Roe became the law of the land in 1973, thinking that no one would have to face the dread and desperation that she once did. Today, she’s harassed as a clinic escort daily but feels it’s worth it.
“The public narrative about abortion for almost half a century has been about deceit and distortions from those who oppose abortions,” Gunz told Queen City Nerve. “It is time for us to point out the medical, biological, and moral inaccuracies of that narrative so people can make decisions based on facts and truth.”
Ask Me About Abortion will run from 4-8pm on Thursday, March 23 at Hi-Wire Brewing, 340 W. Tremont Ave.
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