Planned Parenthood

It’s been some time since I’ve been able to feel rage about anything. In my defense, I’m not alone. When you spend two years sitting in your room watching news of horrific injustice after avoidable tragedy scroll past your eyes, not being able to do a single significant thing about most of them, you tend to get a little numb to everything.

Some people reach into their childhoods for the origins of personality, for forgotten passions and dreams. I reach into my childhood and recover a moment of sacred rage: the formulation of my first political opinion.

At around 9 years old, when watching a documentary on the American healthcare system, I experienced such a profound and unexpected swell of anger that I burst into tears. Today, that anger still moves me the way it did back then.

The health care system regularly denies human beings their fundamental right to care, compassion, and recognition of humanity. In particular, the use of rhetoric surrounding gender and sexual roles to deny people their right to reproductive healthcare is unconscionable. It has caused harm that can never be undone. And it is only getting worse.

I started volunteering at Planned Parenthood when I was 16. I’ve worked for them on-and-off, summers and holidays, since then.

You can witness the progression of my illustration and design skill over the years, as I kept returning to PP.

My designs have been used on social media, in newsletters, printed onto buttons, T-shirts, and sweatshirts, used in educational presentations, and sent out as specialty, autographed posters to donors.

Planned Parenthood, and other organizations fighting tirelessly to provide people with the reproductive care they need and deserve, will long outlive the dangerous and oppressive rhetoric that seeks to defeat it.