A panel emphasizing the importance of self-determination over one’s body. Speakers will draw from hands on experience fighting for better health resources and for meaningful accessibility.

From indigenous peoples to people with disabilities, from trans people to people seeking abortions, the common ground is the act of asserting and affirming bodily self-determination. This means that the individual should be the ultimate decision maker and definer of what happens to their own body. By connecting the dots between these often disparate struggles, this panel will contextualise recent attacks on marginalized bodies as a wider neo-conservative attack on bodily self-determination. Bridging the gap between second and third wave feminism with politics that are relevant and effective today, this panel hopes to forge and emphasize solidarity between struggles with the common goal of bodily self-determination.

Speakers:
*Carolyn Egan was a founding member of the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics and helped to organize the campaign to repeal the federal abortion law and legalize freestanding abortion clinics in Ontario.  She was with Dr. Henry Morgentaler in Ottawa when the Supreme Court announced its decision overturning the federal law. She works as a sexual health counselor and is president of the board of the Immigrant Women’s Health Centre in Toronto.

*Nora Butler Burke works for Action Santé Travesti(e)s et Transsexuel(le)s du Québec, a local trans health support and advocacy project at CACTUS-Montreal, and is involved in migrant justice organizing.  Read the rest of this entry »