Reproductive Health on the Frontlines

In this interview, I became so enlightened by the issues that obviously we have been fighting for in the United States, as it pertains to the overturning of Rob Wade, access to healthcare, and that meaning all forms of reproductive healthcare. And I will tell you, as I told Joanna, it did not occur to me that as we are marching, as we are fighting and working on legislation to try and secure a pathway to reproductive health for women, it didn't occur to me what women in the military are

facing and how egregious their treatment is. Joanna will illuminate the fact that women who are active in the military have to pay for their own feminine hygiene products that if you were to let's say fall ill because of you know, broken bones, or you had let's say appendicitis, or or some cause of bodily harm due to war. You're treated right on the base, right and then you're

sent to a top notch hospital. If in fact you need an abortion, you have to pay for that yourself and find a way to get that care if in fact you're in a country that does not provide access

to abortion. We talk and touch upon the issues of rape within the military, which we know that Senator Krisen and Gillibrand this has been something that she has been advocating and championing for quite some time, which is the order in which women have to report cases of sexual violence and then are doing so to people who they

report to. Do you know what I'm saying, Like, so, there is no safe space, There is no safe space, and there's no protection for women in any forms of care that they may need, whether it is requiring an abortion, whether it is proper reproductive healthcare as it pertains to birth control pills, feminine hygiene products, any of these things. These women are out fighting for America liberty and democracy, and we can even cover their basic fucking needs. So

this interview was very illuminating and shocking to me. I'll ask Joanna at the end of the interview, what is it that people who are not active military can do in order to advocate on behalf of our women's service members, and she'll provide that answer. Folks. I'm very excited to be joined on woke F Daily today by Joanna Jojo Sweat, who is a Marine Corps of veteran, an advocate and activist, an organizer, and is the co founder of Arizona That's

Forward and it is the national organizing director for Common Defense. Joanna, I read your peace an NBC think that you wrote last year after the overturning of Roe V. Wade, and I got to tell you that I was so appreciative for it because I had not thought about because I am not I don't have family that are active military.

I've never been in the military myself. And when we think about what the repercussions are for the overturning of Roe V. Wade, for just the treatment of you know, of women and reproductive health in this country, I never thought about the impacts of women in the military, and you know, just to read your piece and just I want to lift up a couple of points for folks, that women have to pay for their own sanitary products, their own feminine hygiene products, which I just think is outrageous.

The fact that you know you could be out, as you would mentioned in in your piece, in the field for hours upon hours without the ability to be able to again care for your your mentional cycle in any type of way. And the fact that you know you have access to one type of birth control pill, and

what if that doesn't work for you? Right, So, I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk, you know, in more detail about what women in the military have faced and are facing, and how this heinous Supreme Court decision that came down last year affects you all who are doing the Lord's work and trying to defend our country and our democracy and our freedom that you clearly don't have. Absolutely. I was floored when the Supreme Court came down with that decision, and I didn't know what

else to do. Right, You know, you yell online, you can just get really angry and frustrated and feel stuck. And for me, writing has always been cathartic. I'd like to call myself a writer. I'm attempting attempting at least, And so sitting down to write that article, I wanted to think about things from my past from when I served, how that affects the women that are serving now, and even the women who are in transition, who are exiting from the service and going back to the civilian world.

And why I'm so worried about them. It's because we are already a population that is treated less than right. We came into the military in full force because they needed us. It was essential for us to be as a country having the military readiness that we needed and not having enough folks volunteering and so opening up the rents to women. Back when I joined in the nineties, they opened up a lot of the support of combat role jobs for women that hadn't ordinarily been previously allowed

to serve in. So like somebody like me, I came in in communications. I was a radio operator, and there were a lot of units before that I couldn't go to, and that slowly changed over time where you're deploying and being used as a radio operator, even with an all male unit that's going out to do whatever mission that is. And so sitting down to write that article, It made me realize how how even more tragic yes decision is

because it compromises our military readiness. It compromises the women who have made the sacrifice sign that blank check to the United States and said that I will serve this country and that first engagement and the service, you really understand like that you're just a body that belongs to the service. Right, so when you go to boot camp, you get inoculated with all your immunizations, right, oh yeah, yeah, it happens in the service to include your COVID back. Yes,

and that's been happening since the beginning of time. And then on top of that, for women, we go through where they're just they hand out the birth control pills while you're at recruit training for you know, thirteen some weeks not engaging in sexual activity. But it's almost like conditioning your body a to not get pregnant, and then just in case you have access to get pregnant, you

don't get pregnant. But it just to me, creates this cycle that you know, your body doesn't belong to you, it belongs to us, and whatever we want to put in it is what we're going to put in it. Now. Once you leave recruit training. You have access to services, a primary care doctor and whatnot. But generally you're going to get like an ied, you're going to get a pill option, and there's some other ones I think that they've come out with that they've given but then decided

not to provide anymore because of the complications. And so that administering of your birth control doesn't include a lot of conversation about how you want to impact your reproductive health long term. Right, So maybe you don't want to have babies now while you're in the service, but if you're going to have babies later, your service is going to affect that. Right. I'm a Vietnam or a child. I have health conditions derived from my father who served

in Vietnam and was exposed to agent Orange. So it just doesn't start with me entering this service, right, But nobody has that conversation about my previous health conditions, my current health issues, and potentially what the feature would look like for me if I want to have a child. And so that's a very haphazard process you're going through. Like the naval hospitals, it doesn't come with great bedside manner.

You know, your primary care physician almost feels like somebody who is also a supervisor over you because they're an officer, they have that authority. You're enlisted, and so it's very difficult to have that conversation. And my sisters and friends who still serve in the service, you know, get excited when they get a primary care provider that actually looks like them or is from their same culture, right because we know, especially as black women, we don't get the

same care from providers as it is. So that's definitely

going to translate in the service as well. And I can give you an example of kind of like the rhetoric that you get in the service is that one of my best girlfriends who's still serving, Black woman and intelligence amazing marine, just made a Facebook post about how excited she was to get a black PCM, a primary care manager that was in the Navy that was assigned to her as her doctor that she could talk to about her mental health, her reproduction health, all the fact

and her And she was so excited because that first visit with the doctor, the doctor had looked at her whole file and was like, honey, let's talk about these things that have been that I can see you have been going through that we need to address and the empowerment she felt from that experience, and then to share it in a white male marine came on there and just wrote if I would have said the same thing,

I would have been ran at it hell. And it's like, hey, you don't ever have to say that same thing, right, because there are white doctors everywhere everywhere, that's the norm, like ninety nine percent of the medical staff out there. That is your doctor, your surgeon is gonna be white. So it's like people don't even take the time to think before speaking. And if that's coming from one person who serves, he got that rhetoric right, And so that's

a cultural thing. So we have a real problem. And so dropping Roe v. Wade and those protections the women in our service who are being raped such you know, suchially he's assaulted or not wanting to carry a baby to term because of their financial situation. You don't make a lot of money serving. I've joined the service married with a child and we suffered, thinking that it was going to change the trajectory of our life, but it

did not. And again I had two babies while serving, and it was a very transactional experience I went in to give birth, I gave birth, and they sent me on my way. There was none of this amazing care. And I have that experience to gauge in on because as a dependent daughter of an airman at the time, when I had a baby as a teenager at my senior year, I got access to try care benefits and that was a phenomenal experience where like I got to

say at the hospital for three days post birth. I know they don't do that anymore because they just don't know. They do not like, oh, women be given birth, they can just go home, and those things matter to deal with, like postpartum depression. And then on top of that, you when I was in I only got six weeks maternity leave.

And after I had my third baby, after six weeks and I was trying to breastpeed my son, I got sent to a training exercise and so there Joan, let me let me because I haven't heard two questions that I want to that I want to ask one in the beginning, when you're talking about the birth control pill, is that a choice or women are just given it and you have to take it like that is part of your regular care, Like it's not a choice of

whether or not to take the pill. Um. It is you do have the choice, okay, but they issue it to you, right, And so when they issue it to you, it almost just becomes like this becomes a part of your process. And when you're in recruit training, you're pretty terrified. So like the sanitary napkins and it goes to community

property and then a recruit carries it around. You don't even have direct access to it, and then you have to ask for mission from your drill instructor to make a head call to use the restroom to attend to that, and then you're like counted down. You get real real quick. And so the stress helps minimize that experience. UM, but that that's the model of life you're living, you know, and it's it doesn't feel good, you know, you don't

feel clean, you don't it's just not sanitary overall. Has there been any I mean, obviously you have since um retired from service and are now an advocate, what kind of pushes have there been to create a more holistic and humanized experience since you since you began for for

for women in the military. You know, I think a lot of the legislation that tried to get past regard adjudication of the criminal activity that happen in service, specifically to military sexual trauma, is that that conversation opened up avenues for the military to obviously have to address these issues. So what I do know from my friends that are still serving, that they are levels of working groups that are happening things specific to women and their hairstyles, women

of color and natural hairstyles. So we're seeing an evolution of change that's happening in the service. And I will say that those changes usually it's like that direct reflection of what needs to be happening in our society, because the military is a microcosm of our American society, the true diversity of it, and so what's happening inside the

military is definitely happening in our greater world. And whatever's happening in our greater world impacts every serviceman, and I think people need to hear that more because they think that like we're a carve out and then where there's separate society that's not affected by what's going on, but we're very much affected. Our families are affected, and we

also have to return back to those communities. And so if we don't have adequate resources access to universal healthcare, that's why we have so many veterans that fall in this transition nightmare, right, And so it is they are making changes to make those processes better. And I will say the VA and the Secretary of the VA and Chairman Mark Takano, who's a representative from California, has been extremely vested in protecting women, especially in that transition space.

And I was a part of a roundtable group that made a decision that if you are a veteran and you have access to be a healthcare and you're picking up birth control or any prescriptions, you can literally ask for a Plan B and they'll just give it to you. And so that's how you're trying to mitigate things and then also create safe places for women who are on

active duty to access those things. Because as it is right now, if a woman on active duty needs to terminate a pregnancy for whatever reason, she has to source that and pay for that herself, and then she has to take leave. She doesn't get like a medical shit of leave unless then she reports it to the doctor and staff on posts. But then that just becomes like this very you know, everybody's privy to what I was going to say, I was I was going to ask you.

So it doesn't seem as if when you are a service member that there is confidentiality in your in your healthcare. So if tell me what happens, then if you are stationed in a country that doesn't have abortion access, you would have to make arrangements to take leave, to buy a plane ticket, yeah, and fly somewhere to take that services. And that's probably not logical because the timing right, we

don't time these things. And so if you're not scheduled, if you're in a deployment overseas, generally you're there for a year at a minimum or and if you're there a year at a minimum, at the six month mark, you might get some leave to go home to visit. If you're there more than a year, you might get thirty day league block. But what if that's not the block of time that you need to be to get

those services. And that's why when you get ready to deploy or go abroad, they have the do you want to get birth control issued to you so that that's something that you don't have to worry about because once you get there. You know, if this happens to you, we have to send you back. And if we have to send you back, then there could be administrative adjudication and punishment assessed to you, even though this is a medical condition. So let me ask you, because I want

people to really understand here. If you were to hurt any other part of your body, right like if there was harm done, you broke bones, you had appendicitis, these things would be taken care of on the base. They would be taken care of immediately, and then you would

be sent somewhere for the whatever. Like when you're in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you get injured, you get triage you know there however they can and then stabilize you, and then you're going to go to somewhere that has you know, first rag medical care like Hams for Germany or something of that nature. So you are going to get airlifted or sent somewhere to be treated. Definitely not the same protocol for pregnancy or issues of that nature. Wow.

And then for a woman to even report a rape becomes a very traumatic process and a lot of people don't want to even report that. Oh Joanna, this is really like it I my my, My heart like breaks just at hearing examples because I know that there are so many real women that are attached to the examples that you're providing. What is it that people non service members can do in order to be a source of

help to advocate? What could the listeners do that are taking in this story right now and feeling just shocked and disgusted by what you're sharing. Yeah, I mean the important thing is for people to understand and realize that we have the power. And I think so many of us have been conditioned to believe that we don't have enough collective people power to fight back against these systems. But we do know. We've seen a lot of things happen at changes in the military based on outside voices.

So for instance, the abuse physical abuse that used to be endured by folks at recruit chaining that was unchecked. There was this huge movement of Moms of America right who said, you ain't gonna beat up on my child at recruit training, like that's inappropriate, and so a lot

of things change within that. The history of recruit training and breaking down a human being to make them a service of member, so you can't put hands on people you know there there's limitations, and so that's the power of a group of people back together and said this is unacceptable. And I think in present day society, like I said before, people look at the military as a separate animal and that they it's not their business to be involved. But it's very much their business to be involved.

It's their tax dollars that support that entire operation. It's their children, it's their neighbors, it's their friends kids, you know, whomever you know. But everybody is connected somehow to those folks who are serving. And so it is up to us who have served, who are on the outside, and those of us who haven't served that are hearing these things to speak out about it. You write and representatives, You tell them you want these people to be protected.

You tell them that it's unacceptable that their commander who oversees them also gets to adjudicate any issues or crimes that happen under the purview with their troops, because that comes with a lot of bias. They need to say that women need to be treated much better and that the services that are provided to them are first rate.

We need universal healthcare in this country that's completely free medicare for all, and then that will translate to better services even in the military as well as in the VA services, because then we actually have to fund them at their full value that they needed to need to

be funded. And we know that we can do that because the NDAA is so grossly over budgeted, that we could take lots of money that gets directed to the war machine and improve life and the sustainment of health for all of our service members and make it equal for everybody who raises their hands, swears that oath and dedicates their life and service to this country. So we all can play a part. We should all get involved. We should all be angry, especially every woman should be

extremely angry. And I just also want to throw out that in the service, they have been cutting childcare availability for service members, So if you're forcing them to have babies, you don't even have the adequate system so that they have childcare put in place for them so that they can complete the mission of their job. And on top of that they may and pay for it at the

market rate. And so there are a lot of things that can be improved if we take money away from the war machine and put it into services for our folks and take care of them. Joanna, thank you so much for your advocacy, for your voice, for your writing, and continuing to raise the issue around how women are treated in the military, the reproductive care that they need, the childcare that they need, the emotional health and wellbeing

and services that they need. I really appreciate you and thank you so much for making the time for woke A. Thank you so much for having me. That is it for me today. Dear friends on woke a f as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.