The first time I remember being sexually harassed, I was walking out of my 8th grade history class when Eric came up behind me and snapped my bra.  Loudly.  Painfully. For 13 year old me, it was humiliating and shameful.  I was so struck that I didn’t know what to do in response.  Later that [...]

Like many DC transplants, I had stars in my eyes and aspirations of changing the world when I moved to the city 6 years ago. I went full speed ahead, achieving my goals of working for national women’s organizations and finishing graduate school. I learned some hard lessons, most notably that building authentic professional relationships [...]

War can be an intimate experience, often in a deeply personal way, even though it’s a shared collective event.  People experience the physical effect of war through their bodies and perceive their emotional experience in their minds.  My grandmother lived through an occupation, and her strongest memories were of being hungry.  Of her brother being [...]

I am a believer. If I had to name my religion, it would be “Judaism-Islam.” As the believers of both religions believe in One God, my heart stays indivisible. It is a paradox. I cannot choose between these two religions, the two principals of my family (in which there are also devout but very tolerant [...]

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post thinks the debate surrounding abortion, or what he refers to as “Roe Week,” is absurd. In his latest column, Milbank criticizes abortion provider Merle Hoffman for raising a ‘false alarm’ about the threat to reproductive rights in this country.  He then goes on to cite the numerous marches and [...]

The first time I  stood up for abortion rights was back in 1994 in the middle of a freezing cold North Dakota winter.  As I stood in the sub-freezing wind outside that clinic, being screamed at by a hysterical mob of religious zealots, I was terrified.  I had never even been out of town without [...]

It had been a lovely wedding, and now the reception was packed. We sat down to dinner; at my table was my husband and three of our friends, along with three of the groom’s friends from grad school. Introductions were made and small talk ensued, and as our salad courses were cleared away one of [...]

What does war look like?  Taste like?  Smell like?  Images and soundtracks come to mind from centuries of conflict: guns roaring, cannons booming, flesh burning, bombs exploding. These are the sights and sounds that remind us of what we know to be a universal truth: no matter where, when, how, or why . . . [...]

It’s been over 40 years since I founded Choices Women’s Medical Center, one of the first and currently the largest and most comprehensive women’s health care centers in the country. Two years before the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade, I opened the doors of Choices to provide women with services they desperately needed. [...]

I first visited the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial two weeks ago on a brief trip to D.C. I found the memorial striking, but probably not in the way its creators intended. To me, it emphasized how easy it is to celebrate past successes, without carrying their ideals into the future. One quotation in [...]