 And welcome to Moments with Melinda. My guest today is Felicia Cornblue. Hi, Felicia, how are you? I'm just great. Hi, Melinda, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for being on my show. Well, to my viewers, let me tell them a little bit about you. Felicia Cornblue is an American scholar, writer, and feminist activist, and professor of history and of gender, sexuality, and women's studies at the University of Vermont. Felicia has just released her book, A Woman's Life is a Human Life, the story of her mother, neighbor, and the journey from reproductive rights to reproductive justice. Would you say that's accurate about you, Felicia? I think it's very accurate. So that's my, it's my third book. And the first one that I've published with a trade or mass market press. So I'm very excited. Yes, I know. I'm so excited to talk about those books as well. So Felicia, you were born in Manhattan. Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood? Sure. Well, one of the most important things about my childhood and the context I was raised in is that my family kind of lived and breathed and ate politics. And that was especially true when I was very little. When I got a little bit older, they pulled back some. My mother in part, because she worked for the federal government and she was worried that because of some, some legal changes that she would lose her job if she participated in politics. But when I was a little kid and as I recently found out, even before I was born, my parents were incredibly involved. And they were involved in a movement that it seems kind of familiar from today. They were trying to pull the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction. Kind of like what people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cartez or even Bernie Sanders are doing today. They wanted it to be a more responsive party and to be answering the challenges of the anti-Vietnam movement and the civil rights movement. And so they were fully in the machinery of the Democratic Party at the local level, like in our neighborhood and in neighborhoods like Harlem in New York City. But that actually had a national impact ultimately on changing the party and on putting issues like reproductive rights, abortion rights on the agenda of the Democratic Party. And it really had not been on the agenda at all before that. So that was the milieu I was in. And my mother in particular was involved in feminist politics in the very earliest local organizing for the national organization for women. Now, when you were in high school, you were a reporter and eventually senior editor of Children's Express. And basically the Children's Express is the National Youth Journalism and Advocacy Organization which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982. Tell us about your high school years. Yeah, well, so this is less about my parents except that they allowed me to do this slightly crazy thing or what might seem crazy to more protective kinds of parents today. So I was involved starting when I was nine years old. I was a reporter for this Children's Journalism Group that also was an advocacy organization. So it was kids who were the reporters and slightly older kids, teenagers who were the editors but we also saw ourselves as advocates for other kids, for ourselves and for other kids. So we did a huge range of stories about kids in the foster care system and in juvenile justice institutions. We saw them as juvenile injustice institutions. We did stories about kids around the world who are experiencing poverty and war and dislocation. And what we were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for was a long series of pieces we did about children's fears of nuclear war. And in the early, you know, in the early 80s after Reagan was elected and with what was going on in the Soviet Union, you know, the heat was really turned up on the Cold War and there was all this talk about the possibility of, you know, something like a quote unquote limited nuclear war. And we, you know, as little kids we even we knew that there wasn't going to be a limited nuclear war that that was going to be devastating and a disaster and kids were having nightmares all over the US. So we did conversations with American kids about how they felt and what they were afraid of. We did interviews with leading advocates who were trying to bring an end to the arms race. And we even went around the world. So I was a was a teenage editor and I led a delegation of kids to Japan and we visited five cities, including Hiroshima and did a dialogue with Japanese kids who had had more experience with, you know actually talking to people who survived a nuclear bomb. And I even went to the Soviet Union and at least attempted to do dialogues between Russian kids and American kids about our different perspectives on this fear that we were facing. Your political activism is in your DNA. I mean, your biography is so deep and profoundly impressive, Felicia. You come from a political family. Can you tell us a little bit about who had the greatest impact on you at such a young age to get involved in these issues? Probably both my parents. But one of the things that was important about both of them is that they, they just weren't sexist, you know that nobody ever said to me, oh, that's not for girls. You know, girls don't get educated or girls don't take those kinds of risks or girls don't have those kinds of jobs. Like I never, never heard that. So even my dad, who in some ways, you know was not a perfect person. Well, he wasn't a perfect person, nobody's perfect. But, you know, he had some real shortcomings but in that arena, it was just 100% you can do whatever you're capable of doing, you know just like if you were a boy. And, and he was always challenging me, challenging my sisters to think more deeply, you know always kind of asking the tough question, the follow-up question. And my mother was just an example of that. She was a lawyer. She had gone to law school at a time and there were like 4% of the American legal profession was women. So she was in that 4%. And, you know, she used her law degree. She worked for labor unions. She ultimately went to work for the federal government for the National Labor Relations Board. And she was an activist in her very limited free time working on feminist causes. And she was passionate, passionate, passionate about that. And I would say both of them but especially having the example of my mother who had a professional career and like if there was ever a childcare failure or something like my mom couldn't stay home with us if we couldn't go to childcare or we couldn't go to school we would just went to her office and we like played on the typewriter. I just remember many happy afternoons when I was playing on the typewriter in my mom's office and that seemed totally normal. I think to be part of your dining room experience would be fascinating. Felicia, you were one of the first Western journalist to enter Cambodia in 1980 following the Vietnamese incursion. Can you tell us about that experience? Yeah, so that was when I was still a reporter and children's express. The reporters were kids aged nine to 13 and the editors were kids aged 14 to 18. We had realized that when people become older teenagers their perspective changes and so being an editor is a more appropriate role. So, but this was when I was still younger so I was 13 years old. And I had the opportunity with a team of other kids my age plus an 18 year old editor and our adult publisher we went first to Thailand and then we drove from Bangkok to the border between Thailand and Cambodia with the help of translators and some aid workers who really knew the terrain. We were able to interview kids who were then living in the refugee camps on the border between Thailand and Cambodia. So, we learned a lot about the specific situation there. Remember there had been this terrible communist regime in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge. They had that regime had been broken up when the Vietnamese invaded the country in late in 1979 but that's still the Vietnamese were not the native rulers in that country. It was not the native government. So, that was still a very turbulent difficult time and a lot of people were living in these refugee camps on the border. So, we were able to find out about the specifics of that but also to learn more generally what is it like for children to experience war? What is it like for them to experience the kind of massive change and regime that these kids had experienced? Things changed in 1975 with Khmer Rouge. They changed dramatically again in 1979 and then they were living in this kind of in-between space and the refugee camps and so on. So, we were able to learn a lot about children's experiences and bring that home so that the American public would know and so that we could encourage people to make charitable donations and to try and impact our government in the United States and also the United Nations to really do something to improve that situation and for the kids there. What an extraordinary childhood you had Felicia. It explains so much of where you are today. Now you attended Harvard Radcliffe College and after college you returned to the select committee of the US House of Representatives and you worked on the changing priorities project of the Institute for Policy Studies. What was the changing priorities project? Can you explain that? Yeah, so, well, I started out on Capitol Hill working for a committee that worked on children's rights because I had that background from Children's Express. But then I was in DC and I went to the Institute for Policy Studies, which is probably the most liberal of the so-called think tanks in DC. It's sort of in-between government and academia and what we were doing was trying to figure out what a liberal or progressive agenda would look like as the Cold War was winding down. So this is already I graduated from college in 1989, so 1990, 1991, into the early 90s, things were really different and we understood that there was gonna be an opportunity for the United States to reinvest some of the money that had been spending on international wars and on the Cold War and that there was gonna be an opportunity. We thought there was gonna be an opportunity to close the doors of agencies like the CIA and to reinvest our resources and to change our priorities from projecting American power abroad and fighting all these wars to really developing our own country and making sure that all of our people here got a decent education and were able to thrive. So it was that kind of changing priorities. People also talked at that time, some people might remember about the so-called peace dividend, the idea that there would be a payoff from the rising amount of peace in the world, especially between the US and the USSR, as it eventually ceased to be the USSR, right? So we were trying to lay out an agenda for that and provide some pathways for people who are interested forward into this new world. Fascinating. You have authored many articles from the goals of the welfare rights movement to disability rights. You have also authored three books, The Battle for Welfare Rights, Ensuring Poverty, Welfare Reform and Feminist Perspective and your most recent book, A Woman's Life is a Human Life. Tell us a little bit about those three books and then we're gonna focus on your most recent book, A Woman's Life is a Human Life. What inspired you to write these three books? Well, I see it all as really continuous with the work that I was doing in Washington. At the think tank, and even before that, when I worked on Capitol Hill, we were working on children's rights issues, but very often what we were really talking about was poverty, we were talking about family poverty. So that led me into, I got a certain amount of expertise, I think, and also a lot of sensitivity to how important it was to have a really robust safety net for families. If either families that were already poor or families that were afraid, that we used to say in the feminist movement, every woman is just a divorce away from poverty or a divorce away from welfare. And there's a lot of economic vulnerability, especially for moms who are raising kids, but really for all parents. So I wanted to work on that once I did get trained as a historian. And so my first book, The Battle for Welfare Rights, is about a movement of low income parents, mostly mothers, maybe 75% black, and then of the other 25%, very largely Puerto Rican, Mexican heritage, indigenous, and some poor white people who work together to try and improve the social welfare system for themselves, for their own families, but also for other families. And they had some big successes. I mean, one of the sort of surprising things about the research I did is that I found that they were sort of, they were this outsider group, welfare moms. They don't get a lot of love in American politics usually, but they had some really big successes, both in Congress and then in the Supreme Court. So I tried to tell that story, how they went from being this outsider group to also having some big successes that made a difference and even lasted into the current day. And then my second book sort of following on that was about the welfare reform law of the 1990s, which was passed by the Republican Congress after the Republicans took both houses of Congress in 1994 and then was signed by President Bill Clinton and that kind of heyday of neoliberalism, some people call it, or conservative Democratic Party politics, other people would call it. When Bill Clinton felt like he had to move to the right in order to save the Democratic Party, one of the big things he did was he signed this welfare law from the mid-90s. And so it's a fit with what I had been doing before and it also was a reflection on some of the advocacy work that I had done in the 1990s as a member of a group called the Women's Committee of 100 where we lobbied the Congress and tried to say that as women activists and advocates and intellectuals that we thought that this welfare reform was gonna be a disaster. So, yeah. So let's focus, thank you for that Felicia. Let's focus on your recent book, A Woman's Life is a Human Life, which is receiving national attention. What is the difference between reproductive rights and reproductive justice? Well, that's one of the key things that I talk about in the book. When I start out, I'm talking about, I'm talking about mostly abortion rights. The book starts in the middle 1960s and at that time the Supreme Court had just, had just established a privacy right under the Constitution, right? They had said that at least married couples, married heterosexual couples had a zone of privacy that covered their sexual decision-making and that allowed for people's rights to birth control for the first time in 1965. So what came after that was a demand for the same kinds of rights around abortion and people's access to legal and safe abortion care, right? So I tell that story, the emergence of abortion rights and that's usually what we mean when we talk about quote unquote reproductive rights. And then I talk about the emergence of what today is called reproductive justice, which of course includes people's access to birth control and abortion care, but it also includes a big laundry list of other things that might make it possible for somebody to make the decision to have a child, not just to make the decision to not have a child, right? If you're contraception or you're seeking abortion care, then you're saying like, it's not appropriate for me for whatever reason to have a child, but we wanna make it possible for people to also make the other choice. Maybe it is a good time to have a child. So what do you need to have a child? Well, the first thing you need is the physical ability and what people found in the 1970s is that there was kind of an epidemic of sterilization for people who really didn't want that. They were pressured into it, they were coerced into it. Sometimes they were sterilized just totally against their will and without their knowledge. This happened to black women in the deep South a lot in the 1960s and early 70s that happened to indigenous women. So that was the starting point, right? Just to say people have the right to not be sterilized against their will. And then from there to say, well, there might be other things that people need if they're really gonna be able to choose to have kids when they wanna have kids. Like they might need enough money. They might need decent healthcare, not just reproductive healthcare, but like all kinds of healthcare, pre and postnatal care, right? So it became a much bigger agenda. So by the end of the story I'm telling, I end the sort of the main part of the narrative in 1980, but then I do a post script or an epilogue that goes up till today. And by today we have a reproductive justice movement that's saying, yes, of course, people need access to abortion. They also need access to many other things that they're really gonna have choice in this area. So I understand that you hope in your book to inspire and activate others to understand the grassroots efforts and actions can overcome the hurdles we experience when we endeavor to change laws in this country. Can you talk about that? Especially with what's happened with Roe and women's rights today? Yeah, I really wanna remind people that the victories that were won in the 1960s and 70s were not easy. And yet they became possible when people organized together and when they really put their shoulders to the wheel. Like even in New York, right? Which today we think of as being so liberal, so blue, and especially so friendly to issues like reproductive rights. At the beginning of my story in like 1965, 66, 67, advocates thought that they were gonna have to change the state constitution because they thought they would never win any other way. They were completely deadlocked in the state legislature where they had been going and trying to get just a modest improvement from their perspective in the abortion laws, right? But they kept at it, right? And they kept pushing on the legislature and pushing in the neighborhoods and pushing on the Democratic party, right? And pushing on any Republicans, they could get any kind of sympathetic response from and pushing in the courts, right? And ultimately they got the New York state legislature to pass what became the most liberal abortion law in the United States before Roe versus Wade. And it was a two. One of the first, right? Wasn't it one of the first? Yes, and it was a complete game changer because there was no residency requirement. So people could come. People came from Vermont, right? They were, and people helped other women. You know, there were women activists who helped other women cross the border into New York to get safe and legal abortions, which they could not get here at that time, not in 1970 when the law changed in New York, right? So it was a huge victory. And the same thing with the sterilization abuse story, you know, these were not powerful people, Black women, Puerto Rican women, you know, advocates who were outside of the political system. And yet they won incredible victories first at the local level, and then at the national level, they got the federal department of health education and welfare to issue guidelines to every health facility in the United States that reflected their demands to control sterilization abuse. So it is possible to win. Well, your book, fascinating book, A Woman's Life is a Human Life has been called the textbook for future activists. Now, Felicia, do you believe currently that citizens who believe in support reproductive liberty are taking seriously the impact of losing abortion rights across this country? I think people are taking it seriously. I think it depends on who you are and where you are, how seriously you're taking it. But the measure of that for me is that I do see the beginnings of the kind of movement that I talk about. And the book, which is a movement that's multifaceted, it's multi-generational, right? It's all kinds of different people from different walks of life. And people are using every political and legal instrument that's available to them. You know, there are a lot of people working on elections and that's critical. Like right now there's an election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court that many people are putting their money and their time into, fantastic. Other people are working at the clinic level. Like what can we do in a clinic? What if this federal judge in Texas restricts our access to medication abortion? What's our fallback plan? Other people are working on state to state transportation issues. How do we get people from Alabama where it's very hard to access abortion to a state where it's possible for them to access abortion? How do we make that financially possible, logistically possible? It's a very, very agated movement and it's a very energized movement right now. And it's a quiet movement because in my day we would just go storm the Capitol and, you know, with the revolutionaries that we were to help change our country but it's more of a quiet movement. So we may not be seeing all that's out there. Do you believe that we are doing enough to fight against the erosion of human rights in the United States? I mean, Tennessee just passed a law that minors are not allowed to be taken out of the state to get reproductive care. These laws that are being passed across the country in these legislatures are so anti-female and anti-human rights. Do you feel that we're doing enough? Are we making enough noise? Well, all the things I was talking about, I think are significant, right? And I think people really are working, they're sort of growing where they're planted. People are working in the sphere that they're able to work in, right? Many people are. To your other point though, I do think that at some point we have to turn up the volume. This movement has to turn up the volume and we have to be willing not just to figure out how to work inside the law, but we have to be willing to break the law because the law is bad. That I wanted to go there with you because in your book there is that tenor. So talk to us a little bit about that of working outside of the law to change the direction of our country, which is becoming very Anne's made tale. Share a little bit with us about that. Yeah, I think it shows up most in the book and the chapter that I do about the clergy, interestingly. So there was a clergy consultation service on abortion that operated out of Manhattan and it was run by a bunch of liberal Protestants and liberal and reform and conservative Jews, right? And some probably some atheists. And what they did was they helped people get from jurisdictions where they were not able to access abortion to some other jurisdiction where they could find a doctor who would perform a safe procedure and the legality of what they were doing was very dubious. It was very much of a gray area, but they were willing to take that risk. The clergy and the support staff who were involved and the feminist activists who were supporting it, they were willing to take that risk because they saw it as a desperate human rights crisis, right? And for the clergy in particular, they saw it as a violation of their duty to their community and their duty to their faith. And they worked with a bunch of doctors who were also willing to take those risks. And some of those doctors went to jail. Like for example, there was this guy in Canada who ultimately helped bring the case that liberalized abortion law in Canada, but he operated out of Montreal and he went to jail for 18 months. And he was already a guy who had been in a concentration camp when he was a child in Europe. Those were the level of risks that some people were willing to take. And there were clergy who were still standing, there were doctors and clergy actually who were still standing trial or having provided abortions or helped people find safe abortions at the time of Roe versus Wade. And if it hadn't been for Roe, those people would have gone to jail. So I wonder, are we willing to take those risks today? What is it gonna take? What is it gonna take? So Felicia, what words of wisdom would you give to young people today? Growing up on a planet that is warming in a democracy that is being frayed where inequality is palpable in a world where autocracies are rising. What would be your words of wisdom for our young people today and where they're getting shot up in their schools? I mean, bless the families and the children in Nashville. I mean, share with us a little bit about your wisdom of what you would tell young people today. Mostly I would say don't give up. One of the saddest things for me was when, when now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh was being considered and all of the stuff about his, his history of sexual violence came out, I was really excited because there were those protests like in the halls of the Capitol, right? And in the neighborhood around the Capitol and around the Supreme Court. And I told my students like if you feel you need to leave my class and go down to Washington and participate, then you do that, right? You know, I'm not gonna stop you from doing what your conscience tells you you need to do. And almost all of my students said, it's not gonna make any difference. They're gonna put them on the court anyway. Oh, oh dear. What did you say to them? Well, I was devastated by that. And I mean, my perspective was maybe if my students had gone, maybe he wouldn't have been put on the court. But I just, you know, I hope that they don't, I hope they don't give up because it's a big, it's a big assault they're facing. You know, I was lucky enough, I'm a gay person and I came up at a time when things seem to be getting better and better and better, at least in the world of gay rights, you know? And we sort of seem to be holding on in the world of reproductive rights. And now if you're 19, 20, 21 years old, I think it's harder to believe that things are gonna get better and better. But they, you know, we have to believe it. And we have to act like we believe it. And I lived during a time before Roe. So I experienced the horrors of that and seeing that come back, that it could be the scourge on my grandchildren. I'm just, it's horrifying to me, but you're right, hope and activism, and we've got to get these young people revved up. Felicia, we're running out of time here and I could talk to you forever. But I want to share, I want you to share with our viewers, what is your next project? What are you thinking about the next issue that you want to dive into to educate us all? Well, I have two books that I started to read and do a little research around. One is really following through on the themes from this book. I'm writing a book called Sex, Gender, Tyranny, which is about the relationship between the attacks on reproductive rights and gay rights and trans rights and the attacks on democracy. And I'm using some historical case studies from my training as a historian and trying to bring those forward to demonstrate that when we're talking about attacks on gender and sexual rights, that's not really different from the attacks on democracy, that we have to see those things as deeply connected. So that's the one thing, it's sort of an argument book, more than a people book. And then I'm also working on a people book, which is about disability and sexuality. It's called Sharon and Karen, a love story. And it's about this lesbian couple who were divided because one member of the couple suffered a traumatic brain injury and was cognitively impaired. And because they didn't have access to marriage, they weren't legally married in the 1980s, the biological parents of that member of the couple separated them for many years. And they wouldn't let, this woman whose name was Sharon Kowalski, they wouldn't let Sharon's lover, Karen, take care of her or make medical decisions on her behalf. And they fought and fought and fought in the courts. And finally, Karen was able to be reunited with Sharon and they were able to live together again. So I'm also working on telling that story. Oh, Felicia, I can't wait for your next iteration of your world. To my viewers, we've had an incredible conversation with Felicia Cornblue, who is the author of A Woman's Life, is a human life. I suggest you get it at Phoenix Books, shop local and read it. It's a fascinating book and worthy of your time. And for Felicia, my old wonderful friend, thank you for being on this planet with me and helping to fight so deeply these issues that are important to our world. So thank you for that. Well, same to you. Thank you. And to my viewers, thank you for joining us today. And I will see you soon. Happy spring.