Teaching About the Supreme Court and Reproductive Justice
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The Supreme Court’s plans to nullify Roe v. Wade, along with a rash of state efforts to criminalize and restrict gender-affirming care for young people, add up to a war on bodily autonomy, especially for poor women and LGBTQ+ people.
At the same time, the Right’s curricular gag rules and book bans, which have swept the nation in the last two years, seek to silence the history that might provide our students clarity about how we got here, and models for how people have organized, resisted, and responded to injustice in the past.
As this country grows more dangerous for women, poor people, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, workers, and communities of color, so must our resolve and determination to #TeachTruth. Below are some articles and resources we’re turning to for insight and inspiration this week.
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A Case for Ending
the Supreme Court
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In two New Yorker articles below, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor provides critical context about the dangerously anti-democratic Supreme Court and about the role of Black feminists in pushing the abortion rights movement toward a broader platform of reproductive justice.
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Reconstruction Amendments and Abortion Rights
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When the Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, it rested the constitutional right to an abortion upon the 14th Amendment, one of the three Amendments that transformed U.S. society following the Civil War.
In The Reconstruction Amendments Matter When Considering Abortion Rights in The Washington Post, Peggy Cooper Davis shows that advocates of the 14th Amendment, some of whom were formerly enslaved people themselves, conceived of a “liberty” that would address all they’d been robbed of under slavery, including familial rights and control over their reproductive choices.
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Comprehensive Sex Education
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As teachers confront laws like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, it is good to remind ourselves of what comprehensive sex education looks like in the classroom.
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Howard Zinn on the People
and the Supreme Court
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“It would be naïve to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice.”
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Teach Truth Days of Action
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As recent news has made more evident, the situation is urgent.
The lessons the right seeks to suppress are the very ones we need today.
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Teach the Black Freedom Struggle: Seizing Freedom
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Join us on Monday, May 9, at 4:00 pm PT / 7:00 pm ET, when Kidada E. Williams will speak with Jesse Hagopian about her podcast Seizing Freedom, which focuses on the imaginative, defiant ways that Black people sought and enacted freedom throughout U.S. history — and brings to life voices that have been muted time and time again.
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ASL Interpretation | Professional Development Certificates
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Bring People’s History to Schools Everywhere
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PO BOX 73038, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20056
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