On Thursday, January 26th, Travis Ballie, the Lead Organizer in the Field Department of NARAL, came to LREI to talk to our whole grade about women and their reproductive rights. NARAL is an organization that is also known as Pro-Choice America. It is a women’s reproductive rights organization made up of pro-choice women and men across the United States. NARAL lobbies Congress to convince your elected representatives to support your right to choose. Along with that, they organize women and men to make sure that lawmakers hear from the pro-choice people they represent. Travis, the man that came in and spoke to us works at NARAL. Since he works as the Lead Organizer in the Field Department, his job is to take a leadership role in the development and implementation of programs that help build NARAL Pro-Choice America’s grassroots organizing capacity and membership. In other words, he is out in the streets convincing people to help and support women and their reproductive rights. I love this job and I think it is amazing that he gets the opportunity to work every day to bring more young people into the pro-choice movement.

During this fieldwork, I think that I felt nervous because it included the whole entire grade. It was very different to have someone come to LREI. Usually, we would go meet the person we are meeting with. When we met, I still felt nervous, but really excited that we got the chance to have someone come over and teach the whole 8th grade about our topic! From Travis, we heard a lot of important information that we could use for our presentation. Also, we got the opportunity to hear what our classmates thought about our topic. I thought that was very interesting and exciting!

For this fieldwork, we were able to learn so much important information. One thing that he brought up that my social justice group thought was very interested was a booklet called Who Decides. This book has many statistics about women and their reproductive rights. One thing that he showed us that we would love to use in our presentation was a meter that shows how many states protected reproductive health care and which states didn’t. Surprisingly, out of the 50 states, 0 of them had total protection for their reproductive care. We would love to use information from this book in our social justice presentation because it has a lot of striking and important information in it. We want to let people know what is currently going on to women and their reproductive health care. We want them to know that rights are being taken away from women and that it not fair.

One thing that I learned about my topic was that one of the strongest arguments against banning abortion is that when you have an abortion, you are killing a child. Different faith communities tend to define when life begins and many of them think that life begins at conception. Since people define when life begins, many women have trouble getting an abortion. Although, not everyone believes that life begins at conception. Some others tend to believe that life begins much later. This is a very controversial topic. I believe that no one’s beliefs should be able to interfere with a woman’s needs. Currently, people’s beliefs do interfere with women having reproductive health care. This happens in our country because anti-choice measures are made by lawmakers that believe abortions and more are bad. I believe that it is unfair that women’s needs are taken away because of someone else’s belief that may or may not be true. The woman should be able to make decisions about what to do with her body, not others.

Overall, this was an amazing fieldwork and it was such an honor having Travis to come over and speak with us! We have gained so much new information that we would love to pass on to others!

Here is a picture of Travis and my group members! Sadye is on the left. Caroline is in the middle to the left. Travis is in the middle. Georgia is in the middle to the right. I am on the Right!