Federal Policy Brief: Week of March 31st

What's Happening in D.C. This Week

Hi y’all! It’s Lauren, back with the first newsletter in nearly 3 weeks. I’ve been busy capacity building to fight the ground-level harms that communities suffer when powerful people — government officials and unelected tech bros — restrict our freedoms and deny our rights. Behind the scenes of this newsletter, I volunteer at a mutual aid organization that supplies people with free menstrual products, birth control, and emergency contraceptives. Additionally, I worked with my local activism group to pull off an empty chair town hall in a red, red southern state that saw a turnout of 300 people. Hyper-local community is coming together in incredible and important ways.

Today is the last official day of Women’s History Month. If I’ve learned anything from this month (and all the wild events that happened in it) is the necessity to learn about the women- from all walks of life, all races, all ethnicities, and all sexual orientations- who had the courage to lay the foundation for us to be where we are today. Yes we are seeing our rights rolled back at alarming rates but women have never held as much power as they do today. We are in a place of power to defend what so many of those who came before us, fought for.

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The Wins For Bodily Autonomy

1. A win for the CDC: David Weldon’s nomination for Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been officially withdrawn after failing to secure enough support in the Senate in a massive victory for public health and reproductive freedom. Weldon’s long record of attacking abortion access, spreading dangerous medical misinformation, and putting ideology over science made him completely unfit to lead the CDC. It’s no surprise he didn’t have the votes—the majority of people in the U.S. reject anti-abortion policies, and the Senate rightly refused to advance a nominee who would have undermined reproductive health, rights, and justice