With the recent news that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is a member of the group Feminists For Life, we thought this would be a good time to post this amazing video of Sonya Renee performing her poem "What We Deserve". The poem was inspired by an ad on a bus that said "women deserve better than abortion", which also happens to be the slogan of Feminists For Life.
The poem was dedicated to Choice USA, an organization that was founded 15 years ago by Gloria Steinem and other feminists to give "emerging leaders the tools they need to organize, network, and exchange ideas to build a youth centered pro-choice agenda and mobilize communities for reproductive justice". From the choice USA site:
Sonya Renee is the director of Peer Education at Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), a non-profit organization that promotes HIV prevention and empowerment programming in Washington, DC. At work, she recruits, trains and supervises current and former sex workers to act as sex educators in their communities. In addition to her professional job, she is a National Poetry SLAM-winning performance poet who is committed to using the power of spoken word to bring empowering and progressive ideas to the public.
How did your poem “What We Deserve” come about?
Initially I wrote the poem in response to a new advertising campaign running on the DC metro transportation services called women deserve better than abortion. I was just baffled that someone had spent so much money on that campaign when they could have put it into social services they claim are lacking. When I found out about the work that Choice USA is doing and saw their commitment to the full range of reproductive rights for women, I decided I wanted to dedicate the poem to Choice USA.
What does it mean to be pro-choice?
To me, it means having faith in a human being’s ability to make decisions for themselves. We all have an innate ability to decide what is right for us and I think the pro-choice movement validates that right.
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The poem was dedicated to Choice USA, an organization that was founded 15 years ago by Gloria Steinem and other feminists to give "emerging leaders the tools they need to organize, network, and exchange ideas to build a youth centered pro-choice agenda and mobilize communities for reproductive justice". From the choice USA site:
Sonya Renee is the director of Peer Education at Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), a non-profit organization that promotes HIV prevention and empowerment programming in Washington, DC. At work, she recruits, trains and supervises current and former sex workers to act as sex educators in their communities. In addition to her professional job, she is a National Poetry SLAM-winning performance poet who is committed to using the power of spoken word to bring empowering and progressive ideas to the public.
How did your poem “What We Deserve” come about?
Initially I wrote the poem in response to a new advertising campaign running on the DC metro transportation services called women deserve better than abortion. I was just baffled that someone had spent so much money on that campaign when they could have put it into social services they claim are lacking. When I found out about the work that Choice USA is doing and saw their commitment to the full range of reproductive rights for women, I decided I wanted to dedicate the poem to Choice USA.
What does it mean to be pro-choice?
To me, it means having faith in a human being’s ability to make decisions for themselves. We all have an innate ability to decide what is right for us and I think the pro-choice movement validates that right.
Related Posts:
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1 comments:
Wow. She rules.
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