#Fight4Her “Letter to The Editor” Workshop

Event: Letter to The Editor Workshop held by #Fight4Her 

Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2019 @ 6pm 

 

This image summarizes why we are leading this campaign: men who are making decisions about what women can do with their bodies.

#Fight4HER is a national campaign focused on mobilizing action against Trump’s Global Gag Rule and in support of the bill to block it, the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (HER) Act. Activists, organizers, and community leaders around the country are working together to take direct action that puts pressure on members of Congress to support the HER Act. Donald Trump’s attacks on reproductive rights threaten people and communities across the country and around the world. By imposing dangerous restrictions that defy logic and eliminating necessary aid, his policies are having harmful and deadly consequences. The point of the event was to aid in continuing to fight against efforts to restrict reproductive rights and demand laws that respect, support, and empower women, girls, and people seeking reproductive health care both here and abroad.  

The campaign event relates to the topic of international affairs in the sense that even though the fight begins here at home in everyone’s individual states, it is an effort for not only us but for women abroad in other countries as well. Trump’s Global Gag Rule expands offensive restrictions on health care that will have life-threatening consequences such as putting ideology over health, being an undemocratic restriction of free speech, shifting resources to failed policies that will increase unsafe abortion, and ignoring the fact that family planning saves lives. The workshop essentially told us more about the campaign itself and then outlined how to write “Letters to the Editor” to submit to newspapers and bring awareness to the mission. By teaching and assisting us in possibly writing future Letters to the Editor we will be able to elevate the issue in the public view, tell stories and testimonies that aren’t being heard, and most importantly allow us to apply pressure on the people who have the power to do anything, our local and national decision makers. 

What I mainly took away from this event was a more honed skill for writing LTE’s with useful core messages of the campaign to include like the Global Gag Rule being full of disgraceful restrictions and appalling consequences, undermining, rather than improving, global health programs and outcomes. Because LTE’s are often so short, ranging from around 100-250 words depending on the newspaper you’re submitting to, it’s hard to come up with a message that does not look like it was written by one person and mass submitted by multiple people, which would make it less likely to be published in the paper by removing the personal touch that LTE’s should have. I thought it was a good touch that they walked us through the process of writing them so that we don’t all have the same sort of “troubleshooting” issues when it comes down to us writing them.