A Conversation with Susan Stiritz: Legislative Battles & the Power of Education
Our summer 2021 interns focused on the immense barriers to abortion access across the United States. As a part of that work, one of them––Willow––conducted an interview with Susan Stiritz, an educator, social worker, and member of Planned Parenthood of St. Louis's Board of Directors, focusing on her history addressing barriers to access. The blog post Willow wrote from that conversation is below. To read her peer, Rose’s, blog post about the five states with only one abortion clinic, click here.
One cloudy morning on Block Island, Rhode Island, I sat down with my grandmother and my two cousins as we chatted, made plans for the day, and discussed the whereabouts of our other family members. The conversation shifted from light banter to a solemn recounting of my grandmother’s illegal abortion, a story that I had heard many times but one that I will never be sensitized to. While my grandmother was living under the restrictions of the pre-Roe v. Wade era and had no choice but to go to great lengths to have this procedure, I couldn’t help but think that not much had changed. While landmark cases like these set a precedent and have historical value, abortion access is still a fight that many devote their lives to.
Shortly after this conversation, my grandmother brought up one of her oldest friends, Susan Stiritz, a social worker, educator, and advocate for reproductive justice and sexual freedom. My grandmother told us about Stiritz’s immensely popular sex education classes that she teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as the current program she is working on through her Planned Parenthood board member position. As a board member for Planned Parenthood of St. Louis, Stiritz has done important work to implement bussing programs to transport people in need of abortions in Missouri (where there is only one abortion clinic) to nearby states. Three weeks later, I hopped on a Zoom call with her and got to hear about this program, as well as her thoughts on reproductive justice more broadly, from Susan directly! Below is a summary of our discussion, broadly categorized into three sections based on the main takeaways.
Planned Parenthood Program
Progressive communities like the Pacific Northwest, tend to frame Missouri and the four additional states in the U.S. that only contain one abortion clinic, as “the problem” when referring to lack of reproductive healthcare. Not only are the clinics in these states few and far between, but also “there's no way you can survive with the rules that they pass” says Susan. “You have to see the same doctor that's going to perform your abortion, but you can't have your abortion for 72 hours and you've driven four hours to get there. It's just been harassment.”
By contrast, in Washington State, all abortions are legal until the fetus is viable, and around 85% of people in the state live in the same county as a clinic. Missouri’s restrictions are oppressive; however, the work that’s being done to combat them in the Midwest is underrecognized. With many contributors, Susan and the other board members voted unanimously in favor of a solution to tackling legislative barriers: “we need to open up an abortion clinic in Illinois because… They don't have these rules that target people who are seeking sexual health care… we need to have some cabs and some buses and some transportation and some daycare… That is simple compared to what we're going through now. So that's what we did.”
Through the Fairview Heights, Illinois Planned Parenthood facility opening and the bussing program that transports patients there from St. Louis, Missouri, Susan and her colleagues found one solution to begin to overcome the egregious requirements diminishing reproductive healthcare. The program has become a major success: “Aside from being just a relief that we could give our clients the service, it was also fun to think that we could have agency against these seemingly implacable forces that are trying to snuff out ... sexual freedom.”
The “War Against Women” & Educational Solutions
Having advocated for reproductive justice for years, Susan has encountered the difficulties of expanding healthcare access in a conservative state like Missouri: “Every governor we've had since I've been on the board this cycle has done everything they could to align themselves with the -- I don't like to call them the pro-life movement because that sounds too positive -- I would rather call it the ‘war against women’ group.” The motivation to limit reproductive healthcare often coincides with the stigmatization and shame surrounding women’s sexuality. Even within Washington University, a school known to attract a liberal population, Susan has faced anger and resentment regarding her expansive views on sexuality: “Since it's about sexuality, which is a very taboo, conflicted topic, they get upset about it. Even one of my supervisors said to me… ‘I think what you do is disgusting.’ So it's really hard to work in that environment. And you're always going to have some people that feel hostile about what you're doing.”
The work needed to achieve sexual freedom is rooted in education, specifically the destigmatization of pleasure that does not center cisgender men. The motivation behind Susan’s work as a sex educator is to “do the best [she] can to create experiences for clients and students that will help them get rid of some of the shame that our culture teaches them around their sexuality, to reduce the stress of folks that identify with minority sexualities, to affirm everyone of the natural goodness of their sexual unfolding.” The solution is “to celebrate ourselves as erotic beings… and do all we can to help everyone have the sexual pleasure, experiences, knowledge that is their human right to have.”
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Planned Parenthood has come a long way since it was founded through the promotion of racist and abelist practices, when the founder, Margaret Singer, used the Eugenics Movement as a tactic to promote the birth control pill: “[Planned Parenthood] has, for the last maybe three or four years, been addressing its social justice issues… now we're in the social justice, reproductive justice era.” (Reproductive Justice is a term coined by SisterSong, the Women of Color Collective, which moves beyond a reproductive rights frame toward “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities”). Susan’s location has made these social justice issues top of mind, as “St. Louis has been, unfortunately, notorious for being one of the most segregated cities in the country, and so the inner city is, for the most part, Black… the majority of our clients are Black, and so when we were having these protests, these are folks who we’re supporting and their reproductive justice.”
In order to effectively serve this population, Planned Parenthood has implemented change internally: “The staff have become much more representative of the people we serve. The board has really had a turnaround in terms of reaching out to folks who can do a better job than just a white board.” Not only is Planned Parenthood looking to represent its current population of patients through racially diversifying staff and board members, but it is also looking ahead to better support younger generations through increased LGBTQ representation: “Generation Z, almost 50% of them do not identify with one of the binaries, gender or sexuality. … Of course these differences exist, we exist on a spectrum, and so we need to be prepared to serve this generation.”
However, while implementing these diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Susan continues to receive pushback from her peers: “Some people were really angry and felt like I was a rude person for pushing this [DEI] agenda, but I don't think that we look at social justice as a matter of rudeness or politeness. Conflict is always uncomfortable and we have to push this forward if we're going to have a fair world. And in this case, we're talking about the major health services of women in the country.” Further, these health services are accessed not only by women, but by people of all genders––especially those able to get pregnant. Sexual health programs and services that are affirmative and inclusive of queer patients (common shifts adapted in DEI initiatives to health clinics) are crucial for keeping people healthy.
The challenges in moving Planned Parenthood further from its racist past are internal as well as external. Although Susan, as a white woman, has fought hard to serve her community to the best of her abilities through action-based work, she still has to do the internal work of unlearning her own racism that all white people have to do. She ruminated on her time with AASECT, the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists: “I think what's been hardest for me is when I've come up against my own white supremacy and realize, oh my gosh, I mean, these rules that I was implementing as president of AASECT, so many of them are doing harm… I didn't see it. There's a certain grieving in that, that you realize that the greatest amount of work needs to be done on us… It's a very painful process, but that's where we are historically.”
Moving forward in her journey to continue expanding reproductive healthcare in a manner that reflects the community she serves, Susan operates from the point of view that “really what's really important is the work that we're doing together and not to be aggrandizing people who have operated from a point of view of supremacy for years and years and years. Actually, we should be analyzing all the harm that we did as white people instead.”
Susan Stiritz, a pioneer in her field, has illuminated the potential to push the limits and demand abortion access. Through her work combating legislative forces and expanding inclusivity, she has become a force of change in the reproductive justice era.