Women's Rights & Issues
Related: About this forumMississippi pro-choice activist fired on International Women's Day
(the rcc is NOT a "pro-life entity" (crusades, witch burnings, inquisition, magdalene laundries???), it is a woman-hating entity)
Mississippi pro-choice activist fired on International Womens Day
Lori Gregory lost her position at Hope Haven, a childrens crisis mental health facility: Id rather go down for something I believe in
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Lori Gregory and her daughter in 2012. Photograph: Handout/Lori Gregory
Catholic Charities fired a Mississippi employee on International Womens Day for discussing her former pro-choice advocacy work in a recent magazine article. Lori Gregory is the former program director of Hope Haven, a childrens crisis mental health facility in Jackson, Mississippi. Hope Haven provides free counseling for at-risk adolescents without private insurance, many of whom are in foster care. Gregory had worked for Catholic Charities since 2002, beginning as a volunteer and working her way up to program director. She was fired unexpectedly Wednesday morning during a meeting with the local bishop, in reaction to a feature article in Find It Fondrens recent womens issue. Entitled Stand Up, Be Heard, the article lauded Gregorys social-advocacy work, her old op-ed columns (penned under a pseudonym), and her outspoken opposition to Missississippis 2011 anti-abortion legislation Proposition 26, which, the article claimed, threaten[ed]
Gregorys beliefs. The article then commended her volunteer work at the Jackson Womens Health Organization, a local abortion clinic.
Her employers at the Catholic diocese cited the article as a violation of the churchs code of ethics in a termination letter that they presented her during this mornings meeting. If Ive got to go down, Id rather go down for something I really, really believe in, Gregory said. Now the International Womens Day thing is just the Band-Aid of irony on it.
Gregory had been warned about making pro-choice statements before. In 2013, she wrote an op-ed article for Slate about her work at the Jackson Womens Health Center. Her employers reprimanded her for the article and made her promise to stop speaking out in favor of abortion rights and to end her volunteer work at the abortion clinic. These terms were presented as mandatory conditions of employment. Gregory agreed to stop. It broke my heart. It was one of my most favorite things to do, she said. I spent two years of my life intensively involved in social justice work with women here
And it was a great joy of mine but I also knew that I needed to have a job.
The article in Find it Fondrens says that Gregory still escorts women at the abortion clinic, but she says she stopped volunteering after her talk with her bosses in 2013, which Gregory thinks was a misunderstanding with the journalist. She believes its unfair that an article mentioning her previous pro-choice advocacy work could be grounds for termination.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/09/mississippi-pro-choice-activist-fired-international-womens-day-lori-gregory