Beyond Carrots and Sticks: Effective Public Education and Feminist Research in Conservative States

Regional differences in abortion access are well-documented. 87% of all counties in the country (in which about 34% of all women live) do not have an abortion provider.¹ Nearly one in ten women obtaining an abortion in the United States must travel more than 100 miles to reach an abortion provider.² By contrast, the number of “crisis pregnancy centers” (or CPCs) far surpasses that of abortion providers. CPCs are often designed to resemble legitimate reproductive health care clinics but in reality many are fronts that exist mainly to pressure women to continue their pregnancies to term. CPCs have a well documented history of misleading and intimidating women in order to prevent them from accessing abortion care. A 2006 study found that nearly 90% of federally funded crisis pregnancy centers provided false and misleading information about the physical and mental health effects of abortion.³

In addition to being at the nexus of punitive responses to drug addiction and limited access to reproductive and other health services (including drug treatment), many regions suffer the disadvantage of being under-estimated as a site for effective public education and grassroots advocacy. There has been little attention paid to how regional or local educators and activists combat punitive measures and advance the cause of reproductive justice. Although many of the major reproductive rights organizations are concentrated in New England, public education, advocacy and effective activism most certainly can and do take place outside of the liberal East and West coasts.

Consider Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has been deemed among the most conservative states, in part, because of its draconian anti-choice laws and its punitive attitudes toward women. Despite the fact that some progress has been made in reproductive services (for example, the gap between white women and the large population of Native American women living in Oklahoma who receive prenatal care has diminished in recent years), Oklahoma has very high rates of domestic violence, mandates abstinence-only education, suffers the highest rate of incarcerating women in the U.S., and is ranked third for least access to abortion.⁴ In 2005, there were only six abortion providers in Oklahoma; and 96% of all counties (serving 57% of Oklahoman women) had no abortion provider. Five years later there were only three clinics offering abortion services in Oklahoma, while 42 CPCs pepper the state.

Not all young people in Oklahoma and other red states reject pro-choice or reproductive justice positions. On the contrary, often they are only exposed to anti-abortion and right-wing messages and when life circumstances, such as a desire to have sex outside of marriage or an unplanned pregnancy, place them at odds with such messaging they actively look for different perspectives but don’t find them. Finding information about access to abortion is incredibly convoluted for young women in these states, even with the Internet. When women in Oklahoma can finally see their way around the ubiquitous fake crisis pregnancy centers to a proper clinic that offers comprehensive reproductive health services, receiving these services is not usually a gateway experience to political action or empowerment. Indeed, the shame and secrecy surrounding such a medically safe and legally sanctioned operation as abortion are palpable. Even distributing condoms on Oklahoma college campuses is controversial. The divorce rate in Oklahoma is far above the national average because, local knowledge attests, young men and women are taught that it is necessary to wed before having intercourse. Factors that may contribute to Oklahoma’s teen birth rate being higher than the national average include the stigma of abortion and contraception, as well as sexual assault and domestic violence rates, which are more than triple the national rates in the Sooner State. STD rates are high because (again according to anecdotal reports) young people receive scare-tactic lectures that show gruesome, advanced-stage diseases and—instead of relying on regular exams that constitute routine reproductive and sexual health care—they presume that someone who looks “clean” is infection-free.⁵

Under the pressure of these punitive and shaming attitudes and scare tactics that are instituted in schools and churches, young women in red states like Oklahoma are not often encouraged to claim the basic human right to reproductive and sexual health and education. Many mainstream organizations wrongly believe that it is a waste of resources to invest in states where right-wing and fundamentalist ideologies prevail. But writers, researchers, educators, students, and activists in these states know that plenty of women, especially young women, are hungry for factual, evidence-based education and have the potential to become effective grassroots and state based leaders for reproductive justice.

1. Rachel K. Jones, Mia R.S. Zolna, Stanley K. Henshaw and Lawrence B. Finer, “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and Access to Services, 2005,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 40 (2008): 6-16. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reforms – Minority Staff, “False and Misleading Health Information Provided by Federally Funded Pregnancy Resource Centers” (PDF), July 2006. [↩]
4. Sources attesting to these claims include: Oklahoma Women’s Almanac, Oklahoma State Department of Health, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. [↩]
5. See Bob Darcy and Jennifer F. Paustenbaugh, Oklahoma Women’s Almanac (Stillwater, OK: OPSA Press, 2006), for statistics and national rankings of Oklahoma’s divorce rate, teen birth rate, and STD rates. [↩]