Sex Ed and Abortion
Rebecca got her start in Planned Parenthood’s education program, she’s trained reproductive health care providers, teachers, and other youth-serving professionals, and been a labor doula and childbirth educator. She did graduate work in Women and Gender studies and bring an intersectional feminist approach to all of her work. She’s also published articles in Bitch Media and O.school about sexual health, feminism, and structural supports for families.
Visit her website to learn more at: https://www.everybodytalks.co/
Show Notes:
1:19 Rebecca’s introduction
2:00 “If we wait until they’re starting to go through puberty... we’ve missed a lot of opportunity to give them the scaffolding they need to really understand their sexuality, and their bodies, and their relationships”
2:56 “ So many of us without any access to sex ed at all or with pretty bad sex ed… a lot of parents don’t feel prepared”
3:20 Sex Ed At Home
4:55 “How do we raise good men?”
7:07 That was just showing me more of where my work is and now I have to integrate it
11:20 “For me in an ideal world, abortion would just be part of the conversation”
12:19 “I’ve been pregnant 4 times, my kiddo knows what the outcome of three of those pregnancies were and why am I not talking to them about this fourth one? … I was leaving that part of my story out”
12:48 “I have a choice right now to either be in alignment with my values or not, and I need to be brave, and I need to step into my courage”
13:39 What’s an Abortion Anyway?
14:14 Reversing Roe
17:23 “as a backlash to the anti-choice narratives, the pro-choice side feels like they have to defend abortion in this way that negates the sadness that some people feel or the regret that some people feel or the fact that some people do think of it as a baby… there’s not room for those feelings and that narrative”
17:49 “I think there’s a sense that in order to advocate politically and socially for this right to be available to people, we have to shut down the narratives that don’t fit or that could be counter”
Change of identity- of course we have to make room for all of it
What does Pro-abortion mean?
How do we stay available to have hard conversations when we haven’t done the work ourselves?
20:54 “My inclination is to get in there and get messy, I think for most things that is the way forward”
21:18 “Being in alignment with our own values as parents is an important piece of the foundation of having good talks with our kids”
21:42 “Sometimes that’s not possible and that’s okay… I’m not sure but let’s just talk about it”
23:12 “We think we have to have it all down in one or two conversations… for the most part their learning from us in lots of small conversations”
25:38 “You can go back and you can change your mind and you can repair… you don’t have to have it all figured out”
26:08 “we don’t sit in fixed viewpoints we are constantly evolving”
You can’t go back and change anything AND you can go back and change everything
We’re always moving in one direction of another
28:41 “What can that regret teach me?”
We can learn from anything and turn it into something new
“New doesn’t have to mean positive”31:12 Planned Parenthood- “Abortion is a tiny sliver of what they do… they provide such value to the community”
I couldn’t believe how little I knew
Setting our kids up with the resources they are gonna need
33:46 Book recommendations: Cory Silverberg, Celebrate your Body and It’s Changes Too, The Body is not an Apology
@every.bodytalks
