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Planned Parenthood hosts a Roevember event in Park City Oct. 2

Planned Parenthood clinics offer reproductive healthcare. It's hosting a Roevember event in Park City, Sunday October 2nd 3 p.m. - 5 p.m.
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Planned Parenthood of Utah is hosting a postcard-writing party in anticipation of the midterm elections in November.

Election season is around the corner and organizations like Planned Parenthood are mobilizing to support candidates committed to reproductive healthcare. They are calling those efforts Roevember.

One of the event’s Planned Parenthood has scheduled for Roevember is a post card writing party this weekend on Main Street.

Annabelle Sheinberg is the vice president of outreach for Planned Parenthood of Utah. She said the event’s goal is to fill out postcards that will be sent to15,000 female voters between 18 and 40 years old in northern Utah.

“To let them know that it's essential to get out and vote and support candidates who support families, pro-family policies, including childcare, paid family leave, pay equity, and all the things that support families," Sheinberg says. "And you know, on the front of the postcard, we had a local Utah artists design it and it's got some really great stamps with pictures of women and one of them is a uterus and it just says vote. Because this year, you know, our rights are on the ballot.”

Sheinberg said that the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June was a seismic shift in healthcare. And with that shift, the vernacular is changing around the language of pro-choice vs. pro-life.

“What we found is, first off, I think most people would identify themselves as pro-life in some way," she said. "So it's not a great dichotomy on the language. More importantly, decisions are something that we make, and we think about choice, maybe more, temporal, like I think I'd like this in my coffee this morning. When we know this is a decision that people think hard about and for some people, it's a difficult decision.”

Sheinberg said Planned Parenthood wants to honor the decision to have an abortion with more accurate language like reproductive freedom.

“The whole movement for reproductive freedom considers more issues, such as the person's economic status, and how all of these things in a person's life come together," she said. "For example, their access to health care, their experience of discrimination and say housing or school or things that may have contributed to where they are economically.”

Utah’s trigger law, which would ban all abortions except for in cases of rape, incest and to save the life of the mother, briefly went into effect when Roe was overturned.

Planned Parenthood filed an injunction challenging that law in June as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Sheinberg said the legal argument was crafted from the belief that the Utah Constitution now affords people more reproductive freedom than the U.S. Constitution.

She said Planned Parenthood’s lawyers highlighted that to the judge when it sought the injunction.

“We really talked a lot about pregnancy and the health condition, we talked about due process, we talked about privacy, we talked about many things that we feel people are entitled to by the Constitution are given the right to and yet our that is not honored with this with this trigger ban.”

The injunction was granted, meaning that the trigger law is not in effect in Utah. Even though some people don’t realize it, abortion is legal in Utah up to 18 weeks of pregnancy. The law remains on hold through the appeals process and the next court date, which Sheinberg said will be in September 2023.

Earlier this month, two lawmakers, Rep. Kera Birkeland, whose district includes most of unincorporated Summit County, and Rep. Karianne Lisonbee of Davis County, sent cease-and-desist letters to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. Sheinberg called the letters cruel and threatening and said Planned Parenthood considered them a publicity stunt.

“We have a preliminary injunction and throughout the history of the legal system that protects us from the implications of this law," she said. "So we are acting fully in line with how law has been practiced for a long time. And the arguments put forward in the cease-and-desist letter, were fairly radical in terms of how anyone would be treated in the situation we're in.”  

The Roevember event takes place Sunday, October 2nd at J GO Gallery at 268 Main Street from 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.

For more information visit engagement@ppau.org.