Soumya Jaiswal on the Story of Us and the Lessons of Reproductive Justice
Photo provided by Pixxel Designs.
On the evening of April 6, inside the ballroom of the Cincinnati Women’s Club, many of the most determined, powerful, and effective student leaders at the University of Cincinnati gathered in recognition of each other – several honors and awards were handed out to students and faculty for their work, and at the end of the night, the presentation of the C-Ring Women's Leadership Award.
The C-Ring Award dates back to 1922. The UC’s Athletics Department first presented the award for the “best all-around gal.” It is now awarded through the UC Women’s Center, with Dana Bisignani as its current director, to a woman-identifying or non-binary graduating senior student who demonstrates outstanding leadership on and off campus. Faculty and staff nominate students, and the lengthy selection process begins. Through rounds of interviews and applications, five final nominees are ultimately chosen, with one winner picked by the selection committee.
Presented that evening by the 2022 C-Ring winner Maria Bobrowski-Artola, the 2023 C-Ring winner is Soumya Jaiswal.
Before our interview with Soumya, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the nominees for this award. Their stories are not disconnected from each other; instead, their work is done in tandem – individuals making up the whole that moves toward effective and lasting change.
Taylor Allgood – Taylor’s work centers on food justice and nutrition access by addressing race, gender, and class disparities. As a student intern for Ms. President US, Taylor started the Woman Identified podcast to discuss women’s empowerment issues. Through her work at the Bearcats Pantry & Resource Center, Taylor began the Family First Program to supply diapers, baby wipes, and other childcare items to UC student parents, faculty, and staff. She expanded the program through marketing, research, and community partnerships. Her undergraduate degree is in international affairs and political science, and she is pursuing her master’s degree at UC in public administration.
Neha Chawla – Neha’s work centers on improving the student experience for women of color on UC’s Campus, specifically in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Neha founded empowHERment Week to celebrate and support the women-identifying population on UC’s campus and throughout the city. Through this program, she organized a donation of over 1,000 menstrual products and hygiene kits. As president of the Association of Computing Machinery Women’s Chapter, Neha created a mentorship program for women and girls of color at Hughes High School. Neha is earning her bachelor’s degree in computer science and her master’s degree in business administration.
Kim Dryden – Kim’s work centers on the health and empowerment of women and gender-diverse people through advocacy for recognizing bodily autonomy and transforming health care on UC’s campus and in the greater Cincinnati community. With over 1,000 volunteer hours, Kim serves as an abortion doula through Planned Parenthood and as a Women Helping Women advocate. In addition, they are the president of Out in Health Care, a PRISM mentor, and a co-facilitator of Bi/Pan Affinity at UC’s LGBTQ Center. They are graduating with a bachelor’s degree in medical sciences and will begin medical school in the fall of 2023 to become a gender-affirming care physician.
Andrea Szep – Andrea’s work centers on improving access to health education and addressing disparities in reproductive and maternal health care. She founded and serves as president of Justice for Moms UC to improve and destigmatize maternal and postpartum health care. Andrea is also a leader with the Community Health Education Program and volunteers with the Keeping Teen Moms in School Program through Dohn Community High School. She is president of TEDxUCincinnati and a student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s. She is graduating with her bachelor’s degree in medical sciences.
Soumya Jaiswal drives the fight for reproductive health care and abortion access on and off UC’s campus. Throughout our conversation, Soumya mentioned the tenets of the reproductive justice movement – centralizing the inherent right of bodily autonomy, addressing other issues that quell an individual’s rights, uplifting intersectionality, spreading knowledge to all, and emphasizing the strength of collective movement.
These are lessons she takes with her. Soumya has participated in protests and rallies and organized action to address systematic disparities and barriers to care. As co-president of UC’s chapter of Planned Parenthood’s Generation Action, she organized and led multiple initiatives, such as creating abortion care packages for patients, distributing free menstrual cups on campus, and holding Safe Abortion with Pills seminars.
Her hard work was noticed by the highest ranks of the US government. During Planned Parenthood’s National Patient Advocacy Summit in October 2022, after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which overturned Roe vs. Wade and changed abortion policy across the country, Soumya was invited to Washington D.C. to open the White House Reproductive Justice Summit and to speak with lawmakers and Vice President Kamala Harris about what college students were doing to address the changes to reproductive health care.
As the stress of finals week came to a close, Soumya is graduating with her bachelor’s degree in medical sciences and starting medical school in the summer but will continue to advocate for the lessons of reproductive justice.
Women of Cincy is a non-partisan organization. We encourage our readers to have open minds, make informed decisions, and be engaged in their community. The following Q&A is based on the interviewee's firsthand account of their experiences and opinions alone.
Interview by Olivia Taylor. Photography provided by Pixxel Designs.
The speech that you gave at the C-Ring awards really struck me because you described what you call “the Story of Self and the Story of Us,” and I think that really aligns with my personal thinking – we are the pieces of each other, we are made of each other’s stories. So how did you come to “the Story of Self and the Story of Us?”
Well, my own story is something I didn't really grasp or understand until after I started doing this work. I was sitting there, having our other volunteers and patient advocates at Planned Parenthood write their stories, and I saw the piece of paper in front of them, and I thought, “Well, I don’t have anything to say.”
And for the longest time, I just didn’t. When we did this activity, I never participated because I don't have a story like they do. It was a very specific moment when I realized there was something in that thought.
It was the morning of the White House Reproductive Justice Summit. All of the other college students – there were about 10 of us there – were in a conference room with our Planned Parenthood Federation of America director. She sat down with us and said, “I want you to spend the next 30 minutes sharing with each other your story – where you come from, what brought you here today, and why you are doing this. Someone in your state said you are a person who needs to be here for this, so why?”
And for once, the people I was doing this with were my peers. In Cincinnati, I work with folks that are older than me or they're not university students. So for the first time, I was actually hearing from people who are similar to me. I heard stories like, “My aunt had to go across state lines to receive miscarriage care after Dobbs.” Or, “I've seen my mother and my sister have difficulty accessing birth control.” For the first time, I thought, “Oh, something astronomical didn't have to happen to me for my life experiences to matter and be important.”
From left to right: Taylor Allgood, Kim Dryden, Soumya Jaiswal, Andrea Szep, Neha Chawla. Photo provided by Pixxel Designs.
That's when I reflected and realized these things are affecting me because I’m a young woman in this country. Even if a monumental event didn’t happen to me, it’s still affecting me. It gave me perspective on all of it. It gave me perspective on how Mason's abortion ban had an impact on me and how that got me more involved in community organizing and local politics. [Editor’s note: In October 2021, the city council of Mason, Ohio, Soumya’s hometown, passed an ordinance to criminalize abortion in the city. There were no clinics that provided abortions in city limits at the time; however, the ordinance made it illegal to open such a facility and illegal for anyone living in the city to help someone receive an abortion. In December 2021, the city council repealed the ordinance.] Then last year, it was about how our students are impacted by Dobbs and how I can help them. It’s all these things that happened over the years that are my story. It’s not this one thing that happened to me that led me to need to do this work – that's the way a lot of our patient advocates stories are. Because my story wasn’t what I was hearing and seeing from others, I didn’t even think it was a story at all – it wasn’t even relevant. It wasn't until I was in an environment with other students like me that I could finally internally reflect.
Can you talk about the work that you have done and continue to do?
The bulk of my work is with UC’s chapter of Generation Action at Planned Parenthood. We have done a variety of things with students on campus as needs in our community have been changing. We did a huge menstrual cup campaign in the spring of 2022. We partnered with a menstrual cup company, and we were able to distribute over 400 free menstrual cups to students. It was awesome because period poverty was becoming a huge issue on campus.
We organize volunteer events which include creating abortion care packages for patients at the Mount Auburn Planned Parenthood because once the six-week ban was blocked, suddenly abortion in Ohio is legal for up to 21 weeks and six days. That was not the case in many of our surrounding states. So we saw a significant influx of patients traveling from long distances to get care right here in Cincinnati. So the care packages have the essentials – menstrual pads, snacks, little heating pads, stress balls, a handwritten note from us. That event was incredibly popular – definitely our most popular event during that period. People want to help so badly, but they want to do something impactful – and there are only so many times you actually want to call your reps! But seeing and doing something very real, specifically for the people affected, that feels good.
Going off that idea of community, community connection really does create collective power, and that can affect huge change. We are each other's greatest asset. It seems like you have first-hand experience witnessing collective power.
A saying that is chanted at rallies is: “Not the court, not the state, we determine our fate.” In reproductive justice, one of the main concepts is the government cannot grant us the ability to go on birth control or have an abortion or seek certain health care – they can only take it away. Having that mindset is crucial and really helpful when you think about yourself and your community. What we're able to do is what we give each other. Whether or not some higher power dictates everything, all they can do is take it away from us.
Collective power is everything. Throughout my life, I had a very negative first reaction to the idea of power. Growing up, power is something that you learn through life – that people in power try to stifle you and take your rights away. But power, when it is distributed power and is given back to the people on the ground, that’s when things get done. Power can't always be someone who's sitting up top in a chair above you telling you, “No.” Power is actively sharing our ideas because sharing information is how we mobilize, and that’s at the heart of reproductive justice. Knowledge is power; knowledge is everything, especially with all the misinformation and fearmongering we’ve been seeing.
You mentioned the sometimes negative effects that come along with governmental power. I’m curious about your view on activism versus politics in terms of how far politics can go to enact change. You’ve been to the White House and spoke with VP Kamala Harris – do you think it’s worth it to get involved in politics?
I actually think one of the best examples that I've experienced in politics and activism, and what enacts real change, was during Planned Parenthood's National Patient Advocacy Summit in Washington, D.C. We were on Capitol Hill, speaking with senators and congress-folks about various policies that were being voted on. A big part of that was storytelling. We brought in patient advocates who are specifically there to tell their stories and to talk about how the decisions being made on Capitol Hill are actually impacting lives. One of our field organizers made the most incredible statement at a point of frustration with one of the reps, basically saying: it's easy for you to say what you want to say up here, to do what makes you look good, and to answer in the way that is least offensive and the most palatable, but at the end of the day, your constituents on the streets of Ohio are legitimately suffering, and their lives are changing because of what you say and do up here.
Photo provided by Pixxel Designs.
I've always been of the belief that the real change in our community is always local. Even within politics, it’s your local politics. Look at what makes the biggest impact on what's happening in our lives, and it’s always about what's happening in D.C. There's so much emphasis on national politics and national elections, but we've got to start paying attention to local and state elections. In Mason, no one cared about the city council, and then all of a sudden, they were trying to make some substantial and outlandish decisions for us. As awful, time-consuming, and money-consuming as that situation was, it was a very interesting wake-up call for the city as a whole – for us to vote out council members who supported the ban was incredible. After that, people started getting more involved in local politics.
[Editor’s note: Ohio’s voting laws have changed! Every Ohioan must have a photo ID to vote. See the list of accepted IDs or how to get a free voter ID here. If you need information about how to register to vote or where to vote, check out the information here.]
Earlier, you touched a little bit on the intersectionality involved in your work. I think people sometimes see these issues as being in their own bubbles. Reproductive health care access is one bubble, racial justice is another, economic inequity is another, and so on, when, really, they all overlap like a Venn diagram. Can you talk more about intersectionality in your work?
Intersectionality is everything because no one carries just one identity. When we enter a space, we carry the whole of our lives with us. The reproductive justice movement was founded by Black women in the 80s and 90s to address that women's movements were totally focused on the issues affluent white women were facing. The reality is even when and where abortion is legal, a substantial part of the population doesn’t have access to it, and they're often not a part of these conversations to begin with. So a ton of my work is about accessibility and equity and understanding the different levels that people are at when they come in and what they need.
Another saying at rallies is “abortion isn’t a cis-sue” because abortion also affects transgender women and men, non-binary folks, and it plays into gender-affirming care and hormone therapy. The two movements are connected because it's all about bodily autonomy and making healthy decisions for yourself. Abortion issues are also connected to environmental justice because the third tenet of reproductive justice is the ability to raise your child in safe conditions – that includes environmental conditions like having safe drinking water. All of that is addressed within reproductive justice, even though it’s outside of abortion. It's not only about whether or not you want to have a child; it's also about whether or not you have the ability to raise a child in safe conditions.
With everything happening concerning access to reproductive health care, especially within the last year, how do you keep yourself going? Have you experienced burnout?
I think it’s about timing and experience. I've been involved in community organizing since I was a high schooler. A horrible time for my mental health was the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests. I was helping organize in Cincinnati and in Mason. The level at which things were happening was just every hour and was literally keeping me up at night. I was plugged in 12 to 24 hours a day, and I was constantly messaging folks, making sure everything was okay, but I was so outside of what I really needed. I was taking on a huge responsibility and workload, and the burnout was instantaneous. It really destroyed my mental health for that period of time, but I realized how unsustainable it was. I quickly learned you have to unplug when you're not required when there's literally nothing you can do in certain situations.
Soumya and Generation Action Co-President Lily Stewart. Photo provided by Pixxel Designs.
By the time of the Dobbs decision, I had already learned from that experience two years prior that I did not need to take on any more grief and responsibility than was absolutely necessary to help my community. Part of it was, within the reproductive justice movement, we knew for quite some time that this was probably going to happen. So I had done the gradual mourning, went through the shock, the grief beforehand. Whereas, for a lot of people, that decision came out of nowhere and was devastating news, and that’s a lot to process all at once. From drawing it out and knowing something like this was going to happen, it was actually really helpful because we could figure out what we needed to do. Even though the pandemic is still kicking our shins a little bit, at the height of it, everyone felt so isolated. So by the time of Dobbs last summer, I had a really strong support system. My Generation Action Co-President Lily Stewart and all my advisors really helped create a community that, even though all these terrible things are happening, we're going through it together, and we'll make it out together.
You said you started community organizing in high school. What did that look like? How did you get into this work in the first place?
I didn’t grow up in a political home in any sense. My parents are immigrants, and they took the citizenship test when I was in eighth or ninth grade, and that was also when I started discovering what politics was and what social issues were. I started out with protests regarding gun violence during my sophomore year of high school in Mason. It was after a school shooting in another state, and I and other high schoolers started talking and decided that we should do something about this. We organized one of the largest high school walkouts in the state of Ohio. We were planning for weeks and weeks every day after school, under the radar of the school, until they found out about us. But when it finally happened, it was such a huge thing seeing all of my peers join us in this cause. That was my first taste, and then I was like, “Oh, I love causing problems for people!” [Laughs]
That was how it started, and I wanted to keep doing work in social advocacy. It really started my junior and senior year when we met with our school board members, other administration, and teachers about how they could incorporate DEI work (diversity, equity, and inclusion) into the conversations and policies about the problems students were facing. A lot of our Black students were marginalized and outright discriminated against, and we were just starting to combat it. It's been so long since I graduated; it's really great seeing how far it has come from that work we started.
I was looking for similar stuff when I was entering college. The first week of school, we had the student organizations fair, and I saw the Planned Parenthood Generation Action table, and I was like, “Oh, this sounds interesting.” I had never done anything in women's health before, but I knew that my personal beliefs and thoughts were pro-abortion. It was really just happenstance that I ended up falling into this work. I went to my first rally in August of 2019, it was my second week of classes, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is incredible.” It’s just electrifying work that I care very passionately about and now want a career in because being a medical sciences student feels like every aspect of my life coming together – and I’ve never looked back.
We’re near the end of UC’s spring semester. What are your post-undergrad plans?
I start medical school at UC in the summer, July, and then my life changes dramatically! [Laughs] I really want to continue working with the Mount Auburn Planned Parenthood clinic but on the clinical side – that kind of experience is going to drastically change how I function as a clinician. I'm very excited about it. We recently had our orientation for medical school, and maybe this is a Cincinnati thing, but a lot of other medical students I talked to also cared very strongly about advocacy and patient advocacy. So I’m excited to spend the next four years in an environment where people really want to help patients. That's what four years is going to look like – past that, who knows!
Who are the women or gender-expansive folks in your life who influence you?
My mom and my little sister. They both show me and remind me every day with actions or conversations what womanhood looks like and what our shared experiences as Indian immigrant women look like in this world. I learned everything about this life from my mom, and now I'm reflecting on it, modifying it, and passing it down – which is a really crazy thing to think about! What have I learned from my brief two decades on this planet, and what do I want my sister to learn and understand?
Soumya and her mom. Photo provided by Pixxel Designs.
Outside of my family, I have the most fantastic team of mentors and advisors who have been there with me for the past four years. Dana Bisignani, the director of the Women’s Center at UC, I tell her all the time – she's probably sick of it – she has such a profound impact on students, on student organizing, and she has created a space for us to do everything. My Planned Parenthood advisors are all excellent. My work with them is probably 50% of my daily activity at this point, but they're the ones doing literally everything on the ground and making sure people are getting the health care they need – I'm just on for the ride. Of course, my outstanding co-president at Generation Action, Lily Stewart. Everything that we've done, it's just been a crazy idea that goes through three rounds of editing in both our brains, and then it gets to what we actually do in the community.
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