On Tuesday evening of September 25, nearly 300 Planned Parenthood supporters gathered at the Aurora City Council meeting to demand the opening of the health center. Supporters created a sea of pink in front of City Hall.

Then on September 28, Illinois Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama came out in support of the clinic saying,

"I fully support Planned Parenthood's desire to open a new facility in Aurora," he said in a statement released this afternoon. "The proposed center will serve the growing population in a part of the state where access to a full range of reproductive health care services is lacking."

Supporters plan another Aurora City Hall rally on Tuesday, October 2 at 4 pm.

Find out more:

• Planned Parenthood Aurora
• Planned Parenthood Aurora Blog
• Planned Parenthood Aurora YouTube page
  

Susan Abod is a singer and film maker. The former lead singer of the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band is still making great music. See a video of her singing in Santa Fe. It's a knock out.

 

Susan Abod in Concert

The anti-abortion movement has made Aurora, Illinois its battleground against reproductive freedom. Planned Parenthood's state of the art Aurora health clinic remains mired in a legal morass and besieged by anti-abortion protestors.

Planned Parenthood has called for support. People who can make it to Aurora on Tuesday, September 25 should meet at City Hall a 5 pm for a rally and then attend a public hearing at the Aurora city council.

For more on how to help visit the Aurora Planned Parenthood website.

Yes it is and the CWLU doesn't even have a MySpace page. How could it? The organization disbanded in 1977.

But that doesn't stop young people from decorating their MySpace pages with posters from the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective. The most popular ones are "Lesbian Pride", "Sisterhood is Blooming", "Lipstick and Blood" and "Abortion is a Personal Decision Not A Legal Debate".

A day after the September 11, 2001 attacks, feminist writer Robin Morgan sent out this letter from her home in Greenwich Village, NYC not far from where the Twin Towers had once stood.

On this anniversary of the attacks, we thought it appropriate to republish her original letter. We also recommend her book The Demon Lover, which is one of the best explanations of terrorism available.

Alison Kafer will talk about,"Queerness, Disability, and the Foundation for a Better Life" at the University of Illinois at Chicago on September 26.

Summary of the talk:

In the years since 9/11, the philanthropic organization the Foundation for a Better Life has funded a public service campaign touting "community values" and "character development," arguing that these values will result in a "better life" and future for the United States. Representations of disability and illness play a large role in this campaign, with a majority of billboards praising individuals with disabilities for having the strength of character to "overcome" their impairments. Using insights from feminist and queer theory, Alison Kafer offers a crip reading of these billboards, tracing their adherence to a neoliberal politics of sentimentality and their potential subversion by disability activists.

Adella Ladjevardi of Zohe Film Productions contacted us about a new film that will open in Chicago at the Siskel Center September 14-18.

Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is a global conversation among women that spans 17 countries. According to the film's press kit:

Never before in our collective human history have so many women had such freedom to construct a life of their own creation. Yet old structures and realities still haunt us; many women are looking for new role models, but finding them difficult to identify for lack of precedent and because even today women so often remain the invisible, silent class...From South Africa to California, from Sweden to India, the film creates a cross-cultural story about common experiences of modern female life on issues such as love, socialization, marriage, work, childrearing, aging, violence, spirituality, death, politics.

Filmmaker Jennifer Fox has divided the film into three 2 hour episodes. She used an innovative technique she calls "passing the camera" to make the women's conversations more intimate and less artificial. I know I plan to see it. You can visit the film's amazing website at www.flyingconfessions.com.

View the trailer and some brief reviews after the jump.

The AFL-CIO has launched a major new campaign to secure healthcare for every American by 2009. According to campaign director Heather Booth,

Maybe we can make this election provide a mandate on health care reform--getting the candidates to commit to progressive reform and then holding them to it after the election by mobilizing a massive force, in this campaign that means 10 million union members and 3 million retirees. And this time, we will win.

Stop by the AFL-CIO blog to learn more and get involved.

Heather Booth is a longtime organizer with roots in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founding members of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.

Courtney Martin has a thought provoking article about men and abortion over at Alternet. In it she says,"

In the private sphere, men struggle to reach out to one another about their experiences for a variety of reasons. A stigma against abortion overall remains (more oppressive in some geographies than others, of course), often keeping both women and their partners silent with even the closest of friends and family. In the same way that contemporary men are still groping for ways to be honest with one another about all things sexual -- abuse, orientation, dysfunction -- they just don't seem to have the language to talk about their abortion experiences.

I agree that men should be involved, but how and under what circumstances? That will be a long and complex discussion I'm sure. Kudos to Courtney for starting this conversation.

Adam Ayd sent us this essay that he wrote for a school assignment back in 1995. Please feel free to comment, but to be fair, make sure you read it all the way to the end.

After months of activity behind the scenes, we've launched the newly designed Herstory website. We really need your feedback as we debug the new site and add new features. Please feel free to comment or send us an This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it with your reactions. Special thanks to Dana Simpson for her work in transferring the old content over to the new site.