Tag: Reproductive Freedom

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Jennifer Pepper

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2023

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Jennifer Pepper

As the United States Supreme Court prepared its opinion reversing a woman’s right to choose abortion and shuttering abortion clinics, who gets to work opening a new clinic to continue care and assure that pregnant persons have a choice?

Even with all this going against her, Jennifer Pepper does.

Jenn’s undaunted efforts to prepare for the Supreme Court ruling on abortion and her efforts to continue to provide for patients — from reorganizing and cross-training staff to finding, staffing and opening a new clinic in Illinois — drew attention from NBC, NPR and many others who told her story of heroic leadership.

Jenn’s deep commitment to women’s voices and bodily autonomy tracks right back to her “cool mom.” As a young single mother, she taught her daughter and son – and their friends — real names for their body parts, what they were for and how to be protected from HIV and pregnancy.

While Mom worked away from home, Jenn grew up taking care of the household and her younger brother in Alton, Illinois, developing leadership skills and problem solving. Her Catholic grandmothers took grand kids along to community projects like book drives and soup kitchens, instilling in Jenn the importance of helping people. But she also saw the impact family size had on people’s ability to live and thrive.

She says, “Women were who I saw taking care of stuff and I was always flabbergasted seeing my grandmas asking my grandpas for permission to do stuff….I didn’t really care for that.”

Jenn knew she needed straight As to get out of Alton and away to college. When a good-looking postcard from Rhodes College, five hours away in Memphis, Tenn., showed up senior year, she applied and got a community service scholarship.

At Rhodes she soon realized that nonprofits, not international business, would be her future. She interned at Planned Parenthood and honed activism skills producing Rhodes’ Vagina Monologs show and leading other women’s rights and women’s health programs.

One part-time job after graduation was at night at the Memphis Center for Reproductive Health as patient educator and abortion doula, then as full-time outreach coordinator for the agency founded by feminists in 1974. When longtime director Mary Frank retired, Jenn became interim director.

She found out she liked – and was good at – finance, management, the processes of running a nonprofit. When 2017 Woman of Achievement for Heroism Rebecca Terrell was hired as director, she made Jenn her deputy. With an expanding range of services, they rebranded the agency as CHOICES: Memphis Center for Reproductive Health. Jenn leaned into her knack for management and completed her MBA in 2014.

Shelby County government recruited her to run the Memphis Ryan White HIV programs, administering state and federal grant funds. But four years later, when Rebecca took her to lunch in May 2018 talking about the new birthing center CHOICES was building, Jenn eagerly returned as director of finance and operations.

With the birthing clinic, CHOICES became the first nonprofit, non-hospital health care provider in the country to offer both birth services and abortion care under one roof. CHOICES reproductive and sexual health care today covers perinatal and birth services, HIV testing and prevention, contraceptives, STI testing, gender-affirming care, IVF services and well-person exams.

In early 2020 Rebecca prepared to retire and asked Jenn to succeed her as president and CEO. The two worked closely with each other and the board for the transition on Jan. 1, 2021. Roe v. Wade guaranteeing the right to abortion was overturned on June 24, 2022.

“This is my third year,” Jenn says, “and it feels like 10 in lots of ways.”

To continue offering reproductive health care that was banned and made illegal in her own state last August, Jenn led CHOICES in opening a clinic in Carbondale, Illinois, one of the first and few abortion providers to open in a new state. It’s up the Amtrak line from Memphis or a 3 ½ -hour drive, in a state that passed a law in 2019 protecting the right to abortion. CHOICES’ new clinic saw its first patients on Oct. 11, 2022. It is the southernmost abortion clinic for most people across the Southeast.

Abortion is health care. Often life-saving care. Pregnancy complications should not become a possible death sentence. But Tennessee law forbids medical care in most circumstances and even bans terminations for raped, impregnated children.

Jenn Pepper stands firm, speaking out and working heroically to secure crucial health care that we all deserve.

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Cherisse Scott

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2018

VISION
for a woman whose sensitivity to women’s needs
led her to tremendous achievements for women:

Cherisse Scott

28 years old.

Singing the lead in a national touring company production.

Pregnant.

Home to Chicago and to an abortion clinic.

Only it wasn’t. It was a crisis pregnancy clinic where Cherisse Scott was convinced to stay pregnant and sent home with a onesie. She went back to her pre-musical job as a paralegal, delivered her son and seven months later was unemployed, on food stamps and getting nothing from the crisis clinic to sustain the life, health and well-being of her child.

For six years, and through three pregnancies that were terminated by abortion, Cherisse worked temp jobs and performing gigs. She says, “I didn’t understand my body. I had no information. After the third time, I ran into a reproductive justice advocate who finally taught me how to understand my fertility.”

The power of understanding her body – fertility, pregnancy and how to prevent it – made her passionate about sex education. She knows full well how life changes positively when a woman is empowered with access and information about her reproductive and sexual health.

She began volunteering with her new friend’s group – Black Women for Reproductive Justice – and soon joined the board and then the staff.

In 2011 Cherisse moved to Memphis where her mother lives and where she had spent part of her childhood. Her mother saw the need for what Cherisse was doing in Chicago to be black-woman led on behalf of black women, Cherisse says.

With her mother and grandmother as honorary co-founders, she launched SisterReach, a nonprofit whose mission is focused on empowering women and girls of color through a broad interpretation of reproductive justice.

SisterReach defines reproductive justice as “the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, economic and social well-being of women and girls, and will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families and our communities in all areas of our lives.”

SisterReach provides comprehensive sexuality education, sexual communication training and outreach to women and girls, men and boys, families and LGBTQI individuals at churches, schools, community centers and through local, state, regional and national collaboratives such as Memphis Teen Vision, Free Condoms Memphis, Choose2Wait, Healthy and Free Tennessee, Advocates for Youth, Trust Black Women and Raising Women’s Voices. Outreach efforts and classes cover healthy relationships, anatomy, birth control, consent and risky behavior.

Women in higher poverty areas are at greater risk of unwanted pregnancy, dropping out of school and other things related to sexual health so SisterReach strives to guide women and girls to resources for pap smears, emergency contraception, testing and treatment.

Cherisse and SisterReach produced a 2015 report on the need for comprehensive sexuality education for Southern youth of color; opposed anti-abortion billboards in Memphis targeting black men, trained clergy and faith leaders on social justice issues; and presented to the United Nations Working Group on the Issue of Discrimination against Women in Law and Practice on the impact of fetal assault legislation on Tennessee women. SisterReach’s work and state and national partners led to defeat of the fetal assault bill which in 2016 criminalized women struggling with drug addiction.

Cherisse is a 2016 Rockwood Institute Fellow, Reproductive Justice and Faith Fellow with the Center for American Progress and has been featured in New York magazine, O magazine, NBC News #31DaysofFeminism Campaign and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. A recent push for meetings in Washington are aimed at talking to decision-makers about the kind of support black women need.

And on top of all that, Cherisse has returned to her music, singing jazz/soul/R&B fusion. She will release a third album this year and wants to create a one-woman show that incorporates her social justice passion and her music.

In a social and political atmosphere which scapegoats and stereotypes young women of color for their sexuality, Cherisse instead teaches, supports and advocates for them in claiming control over their bodies and their reproductive decisions.

“I’m a bisexual black woman who is also a Christian and a minister,’ Cherisse says. “I hope SisterReach is a space for black and brown women to feel community.”

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Owen Phillips

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2015

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Dr. Owen Phillips

Since the 1980s, those who strive to assure American women access to complete reproductive health care, including termination of pregnancy, have been threatened with bombings, kidnappings, shootings and arson.

Doctors have been shot to death, even in their churches; nurses and other clinic staff have been killed or have lost eyes and limbs. Clinics have closed due to terrorism and those few that remain open strive constantly to protect personnel from danger.

In Tennessee last year, a proposal called Amendment One set out to change the state constitution’s protection of privacy rights that would grant state legislators the ability to pass unlimited restrictions on abortion, with no exceptions for rape, incest or saving the life of the mother.

Women concerned about the potential loss of healthcare and the likelihood that politicians could acquire control over women’s health care decisions organized across Tennessee to fight Amendment One. The Vote No on One campaign needed the voices of strong women – physicians, lawyers and healthcare consumers – to speak in commercials to educate voters about the potential impact of the amendment.

When the question was asked in Memphis – what doctor will appear in commercials to oppose Amendment One – Owen Phillips did not hesitate. This obstetrician-gynecologist, a specialist in high risk pregnancy and genetics, researcher and educator of student doctors raised her hand and signed on to be a face and a voice in support of women’s rights to control their own destiny.

In Owen’s commercial, which aired across the state, she told the compelling story of a patient diagnosed with cancer who chose to continue a pregnancy rather than treat her disease. She died – but she had charge of her decision. Owen said, “It was her decision and no one else’s.”

This heroic gesture was only the latest in Owen’s consistent support of women’s right to full reproductive care. She wrote an op-ed for the newspapers about the “dangerous and troubling” amendment. She wrote:
“I have had patients whose doctors advised them that because of their medical conditions, continuing a pregnancy would jeopardize their lives and leave their children motherless.
“I have had patients whose pregnancies resulted from failed contraception, even methods that were supposed to have been permanent.
“I have cared for 12-year-olds who have been raped by family members.”

Owen continued: “I am not in a position to make decisions for any of these women and their families, but neither is a politician or community member who has never faced such a terrible situation.”

Owen grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, where she earned her undergraduate and medical degrees. Even in high school she worked at a free clinic in Jackson, driving a home health nurse into the poorer neighborhoods to check on elderly residents.

Many years later, Owen joined Big Brothers Big Sisters where her relationship with one little girl has become support and mentoring for multiple children in two related families. In 2008, she received the Big Sister of the Year award for the Greater Memphis Area as well as volunteer of the year for the state of Tennessee for the organization.

Owen is a board member and past board president for the Memphis Area Women’s Council, a non-profit advocacy organization which seeks to eliminate barriers to women’s access to safety, equity and justice.

Being a visible face in support of reproductive rights has been deadly for physicians in our country but Owen Phillips does not hesitate. She has spoken out consistently in support of women and their sole right to make their own health care decisions with access to a full range of care.

Her heroic stance brings a reasoned, experienced voice to a difficult and urgent topic.

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Rebecca Terrell

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2017

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Rebecca Terrell

As the executive director of CHOICES: Memphis Center for Reproductive Health, Rebecca Terrell daily faces the ever-present danger that accompanies leadership of an agency that, in addition to its other activities, offers abortion counseling and services.

Despite great opposition, she has campaigned to make conversations about women’s health, teen pregnancy, comprehensive and evidenced-based sex education, and the rights of women to safe abortion care a reality in our community. To an already challenging list, she has added providing services to the LGBTQ community including transgender people. Rebecca consistently works here and nationally to make her vision of open discussion and effective delivery of reproductive healthcare a reality

With a Masters in Public Administration and after years as a dancer, Rebecca spent 15 years as executive director of the Florida Dance Association. Her husband’s work brought them to Memphis in 1998. Here she spent the first five years at home with their twins. When she was ready to reenter the workforce, she talked her way into a part-time job at the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis. She was there 6 years then started looking for fulltime work. A friend mentioned that the position of executive director for what was then Memphis Center for Reproductive Health was open. Her first thoughts: “No way! Too intense! Who’d want to do that?” But she kept thinking about the job. Finally she called the director at that time and was told that what MCRH did was abortions. Out of an old house in Midtown.

Rebecca had a vision about sustaining and widening this long-standing feminist women’s center and almost before she knew it, she’d applied and been hired. The job came with both local and national opponents but Rebecca was up to the challenge.

Rebecca’s long-range vision was to transform MCRH into a healthcare facility providing a broad range of services from fertility assistance to a birthing center, STI tests, PAP tests, and breast exams to very specialized services for people living with HIV, the lesbian and gay community and transgender patients. She oversaw the move from the old house to an updated clinic space. MCRH became CHOICES. In 2011, the agency celebrated the new name at the new clinic located at 1726 Poplar. The location has a large, pleasant waiting room filled with information on reproductive health and jars of free condoms. CHOICES now serves more than 3,000 women, men and teens each year and is already outgrowing the space.

Rebecca knows that CHOICES changes peoples’ lives. This is obvious in notes sent thanking staff for kind, competent, non-judgmental care. Many are hand-written and include hearts. Some are from mothers saying they are glad their daughters have been able to make choices different from their own. One young man in transition said, “Each one of your jobs is changing lives, from the receptionist that tells me to sign in, the nurse that walks me to my room and even the lady who always greets me with a warm hello and says ‘I’m going to need you to pee in a cup today.’ ”

Rebecca knows that reproductive rights are always in danger. With that in mind, she is constantly looking for ways to bring allies to the fight.

In 2009 Rebecca served as chair and founding member of Memphis Teen Vision (MemTV). This coalition of 250 local agencies is dedicated to being comprehensive and inclusive of all members’ perspectives. The shared intention is to create a future where all teens are taught comprehensive sex education, teens’ onset of sexual intercourse is delayed, teen pregnancies are reduced/eliminated and teen parents are provided assistance. Rebecca’s confident voice leads the way.

In 2012, Rebecca became the founding member and chair of a statewide coalition: Healthy and Free Tennessee. The group now has over 40 member organizations statewide working together to promote and protect sexual health and reproductive freedom. The Coalition includes individual members and has regional and national partners. In her leadership role, Rebecca speaks out on legislation, leads rallies, and stands up for full and accessible reproductive health care for all.

Today Rebecca is leading the charge to raise $4 million to build a new clinic for CHOICES. The next expansion includes three birthing suites for midwife-assisted births. The facility will be the only non-profit in America to offer a full range of reproductive services.

Rebecca shared this idea of full-service comprehensive reproductive care at a recent national conference of the Abortion Care Network. She believes expanding reproductive services beyond abortion is the way forward.

We know that those who speak out and take action around reproductive rights have been harassed, stalked, even killed, yet Rebecca says that she is not frightened. She purposefully has an office with windows looking out on a busy street. She refuses to be afraid, she refuses to sit down and she refuses to be quiet.

Her heroic spirit is a model for all.

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Ashley Coffield

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2016

COURAGE
for a woman who, facing active opposition,
backed an unpopular cause in which she deeply believed:

Ashley Coffield

On a list of taboo subjects in our community, the right of a woman to make her own reproductive choices would be near the top. In this conservative part of the country, that’s a conversation that most people would rather avoid, yet in her role as President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region, Ashley Coffield stands up and speaks out daily.

As columnist Gail Collins said in The New York Times this fall, “Being at the helm of Planned Parenthood in the current climate is more like steering a boat carrying unstable explosives…while surrounded on both sides by enemy pirates throwing burning torches.”

But Ashley Coffield is up to the challenge. A fearless leader, passionate advocate and champion for women’s health, she joined Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region at a watershed moment and has led PPGMR through many transitions. She has overseen the expansion of advocacy efforts to empower patients, led staff and hundreds of volunteers throughout Tennessee during the Vote No on Amendment One campaign in the fall of 2014 and led the battle against new anti-abortion laws in Tennessee in 2015.
Born and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Ashley came to the “big city” to attend Rhodes College. As a student with no insurance, she was a patient of Planned Parenthood. She was so impressed with the organization’s compassionate and confidential care that she became a volunteer health educator. That sparked an interest and set her on the path of a 20-year career in public health that has included time in Washington, DC, at the Public Health Foundation and later leading the advocacy group Partnerships for Prevention for 12 years, three as executive director.

When she and her husband decided to return to Memphis to start their family, she telecommuted to her job in Washington but joined Planned Parenthood as a board member for 9 years, serving 2 as board chair. She left the board for a couple of years but was asked to serve on the Search Committee for a new Executive Director. This led her to apply for the job with an organization she reveres.

Founded in 1938, as a result of women’s kitchen table talks, the Memphis Planned Parenthood provides high-quality, affordable reproductive services and education to women and men throughout the Mid-South, regardless of their ability to pay. This year PPGMR celebrates its 75th anniversary.
Ashley became President and CEO on April 1, 2013. It has been a momentous three years.

Asked if she worries about the daily protesters outside the clinic, she said, “They don’t worry me…though there have been some dark days……It’s the politicians in office who want to remove the rights for which we’ve fought.”
Ashley says that the courage required for this job is not in facing the protesters or the threats but the courage needed to talk about abortion; to work to remove the stigma around discussing unplanned pregnancy.

She fights for women who have no voice, especially poor women who struggle to get family planning services through Obamacare or Medicaid Insurance.
She credits the debate over Amendment One for opening the public conversation in Tennessee. She sees a huge difference in Tennessee women’s willingness to speak out since that battle over the state constitution and women’s rights. The silent majority was activated – and Ashley and PPGMR led that fight. She worked literally day and night for weeks on end in the finally-unsuccessful effort to defeat the amendment and is vigilant now in efforts to block new laws it made possible that can further restrict or end a woman’s right to full reproductive healthcare in Tennessee.

Ashley feels strongly that people should live the lives they want to lead, not based on what someone else wants them to do – whether a partner, spouse, parents or government. She works to provide a safe place for women and men to make their own important decisions free of judgment or coercion. That’s what motivates her to have the courage to get up every day and keep fighting to keep the doors open and choices available.

Ashley Coffield is the 2016 Woman of Achievement for Courage.

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Judith Schwarz Scharff

Women of Achievement
1992

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Judith Schwarz Scharff

Judith Schwarz Scharff was a mother of four sons whose energy and dynamism established Memphis Planned Parenthood as a major reproductive health clinic in the Mid-South. Though she died of cancer at age 40, her impact lives on.

Born in New Orleans, Judith attended Connecticut College for Women briefly and married at age 17. Her first child was born two years later and by 1961 there were four. Her husband’s work brought her to Memphis in 1956 where she plunged into music and art groups, political campaigns and women’s causes with enthusiasm.

She was volunteering at a Memphis school when she encountered five teenage girls who were pregnant and first heard about an effort to establish a family planning clinic in Memphis. As she had done with other causes, she rapidly turned her concern into action and soon became the first board president of the newly revived Memphis Association for Planned Parenthood (MAPP) in 1966.

At that time family planning help for low-income groups was not available in Memphis except for a group of women voluntarily participating in a research project in City of Memphis hospitals. At the early meetings of the first board, Judith’s enthusiasm for the agency was unparalleled. Her faithful determination ensured Planned Parenthood’s success. She chaired many committees and often single-handedly accomplished their charges. She not only served on the board and committees, gave and raised money, but also worked clinics whenever asked.

She served on the national and southeast region information and education committees and served on the Memphis agency board for nine years. Judith was determined that every child would be a wanted child in this city. “The atmosphere of MAPP in this era was charged by Judith’s constant presence,” said former board president Ed Kaplan. “She was a magnet. She made us all brave because we were afraid to be less courageous than she.”

In 1975, after devoting many volunteer hours to Planned Parenthood, Judith took the job of director of information and education and continued until her death on May 10, 1976. The board established the Judith S. Scharff Memorial Education Fund and uses the proceeds to maintain a library for Planned Parenthood.

Judith had many interests beyond Planned Parenthood. She was administrative director of Transition Center, Inc., a board member of Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, a former member of the board of governors of United Way of Greater Memphis, and a member of United Way’s health and welfare planning council. She was secretary of the board of trustees of the Memphis Academy of Arts, a docent for Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and a board member of the Memphis Orchestral Society.

Those who can remember or even imagine a time when birth control was unavailable to most women in Memphis, and when reproductive health care was a luxury for the wealthy only, will agree that Judith Scharff has left a rich heritage — a heritage that continues to enrich our lives today.