Feminist Women's Health Center (Atlanta, Georgia)

The Feminist Women’s Health Center of Atlanta is a feminist health center that provides comprehensive gynecological health care, engages in community outreach, and advocates for reproductive justice.

History

The Feminist Women’s Health Center (FWHC) was founded in 1977. Like many other feminist health centers, the Atlanta FWHC was born out of self-help groups, where women learned to examine their own cervixes.^[1]

The Atlanta Feminist Women’s Health Center was a member clinic of the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers (FFWHC). The Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers originated in Los Angeles, and subsequently member clinics opened throughout California and eventually other parts of the country, including Tallahassee, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia. Women’s health movement historian Sandra Morgen notes, “Until the National Black Women’s Health Project… in the 1980s, the FFWHC was the only multiple-site group in the larger women’s health movement.”^[2] All member clinics provided abortion and gynecological health care, and worked together to “espouse a unified ideology and identifiable politics.”^[3]

The FFWHC member clinics stood out from others in the women’s health movement because they adopted a more hierarchal model when other feminist clinics were operating as collectives. The debate and dispute over the FFWHC’s mode of operation reached a point where some women’s health centers refused to refer clients to FFWHC clinics for abortions. In 1990, Carol Downer, founder of the Los Angeles FWHC and leader in the women’s health movement, responded to the controversy: “Most of the criticisms I’ve heard revolve around hierarchy… I might say it was the difference between being organized and disorganized… It’s hard for me to understand why anyone who goes into a political arena doesn’t want to be as organized as they can possibly be… if you really are serious about what you are doing. Because otherwise you are the mercy of these larger forces which are organized.” ^[4]

A few years after moving their headquarters to Eugene, Oregon,^[5] the costs of operating the FFWHC offices proved too expensive. Although the member clinics stay in touch, they are no longer formally connected as a federation.^[6] However, most of these clinics, including the Atlanta FWHC, are now part of a new consortium of women’s health care providers, the Feminist Abortion Network.

Today, the Atlanta Feminist Women’s Health Center is one of several extant feminist health centers.^[7] Many clinics closed their doors as a result of financial worries; threats, harassment, and violent attacks; or from competition from other health-care providers, including national chains such as Planned Parenthood and for-profit women’s health centers. Although the Atlanta FWHC certainly faced many of the same problems as the clinics that closed, they have not only managed to remain open, but continue to provide a wide array of health services and outreach programs to meet the needs of the Atlanta community.

Health Services

The Feminist Women’s Health Center offers a variety of health care programs, many of which are designed to reach historically underserved populations within the Atlanta community.^[8] In addition to providing comprehensive gynecological services, the center also offers a donor insemination program and the Trans Health Initiative.

Donor Insemination

The donor insemination program began at the Feminist Women’s Health Center in 1988. The program began because most infertility specialists in the southern United States were only willing to offer their services to married women, leaving single heterosexual women and lesbians alike unable to access fertility treatments.^[9] When the FWHC began offering its donor insemination services, it was only one of about a dozen clinics in the entire country to offer these services. In a 1990 profile of the program, an employee of the center noted that only about 5% of the women seeking donor insemination were married, and about a third of the program’s clients were lesbians.^[10]

The donor program continues to operate to this day. The center emphasizes that it is committed to being an inclusive program that is “supportive of alternative family-building options.”^[11] The Feminist Women’s Health Center currently offers donor insemination alongside other reproductive health services, including fertility assessment and a program designed to help women decide if donor insemination is the right choice for them.^[12]

Trans Health Initiative

The Feminist Women’s Health Center began offering health services to transmasculine individuals in 2000. The Trans Health Initiative was founded in the memory of Robert Eads, a partially transitioned trans man who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 53 after being denied medical care.^[13]

The Feminist Women’s Health Center began by offering low-cost gynecological services to trans men at the annual Southern Comfort Conference, and continue to offer services at the conference as the Robert Eads Clinic.^[14] The Clinic saw more and more patients each year, and in June 2008, the FWHC began offering services to transmen year-round through the Trans Health Initiative.^[15]

The Trans Health Initiative serves clients throughout the Southeast. Many of the clinic’s clients have traveled across state lines because there is no trans-friendly health care provider in their own state. In addition to providing their clients with non-judgmental health care, the Trans Health Initiative is also working to educate the medical community about transgender health.^[16]

Community Engagement

Like other feminist health centers,^[17] Feminist Women’s Health Center recognizes that access to health care is closely linked with politics and other social factors. As a result, FWHC has a community engagement and advocacy department in addition to providing health care at their clinic. FWHC’s community engagement transpires through a variety of programs. Their range includes: a Feminist Film Forum, where volunteers can watch and discuss topical films;^[18] Voice Beyond Choice Advocacy Days, where volunteers can learn about the politics of reproductive justice and lobby their state legislators;^[19] and the Lifting Latina Voices Initiative, a health outreach program that strives to empower and educate the Latina community in addition to addressing health disparities that impact Latinas.^[20][21]

Walk in My Shoes, Hear Our Voice

On March 12, 2012, the Feminist Women’s Health Center organized a protest at the Georgia State Capitol, along with a wide range coalition partners that included ACLU – Georgia and SisterSong Reproductive Justice Collective.^[22][23] The protest was in response to a spate of legislation that would restrict Georgia women’s access to reproductive health care, ranging from religious exemptions for birth control coverage to a twenty-week abortion ban.^[24][25] Over five hundred people showed up to the protest,^[26][27] which was organized around the principles that women have a right to:^[28]

• determine when and whether to have children,
• have a healthy pregnancy and birth;
• become a parent and parent with dignity, and
• have safe and healthy relationships and families.

See also

• Black Women’s Health Imperative, formerly the National Black Women's Health Project

References

External links

• Feminist Women's Health Center Atlanta website