Educate
At Lift Louisiana, we believe all women deserve the chance to make their voices heard on the issues that impact their lives, their families, and their communities. We believe in meeting people where they are in their reproductive health journeys, and we support what they determine to be the best decisions for themselves while providing information and access to information to inform their decisions.
We work to inspire and share tools to increase people’s ability to speak up for themselves. To this end, Lift creates non-biased, data-driven educational materials on key issues (such as healthcare access, abortion laws and regulations, and teen sexual health). Lift produces sharable resources—like fact sheets, advocacy talking points, and policy analyses—to ensure that medically-accurate, evidence-based research is informing public opinion.
Visit our Resources page for more information on resources for pregnant and parenting people and domestic violence survivors.
Awareness Campaigns.
With the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, many states across the south have already banned or are moving quickly to ban nearly all abortions. Without access to abortion care in those states, pregnant people will be forced to travel to other states, such as Illinois, to obtain the care they need. The same states that are dismantling and criminalizing access to abortion are also working to prohibit and criminalize gender-affirming care for trans people.
In August of 2022, reproductive and trans healthcare leaders and advocates from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana embarked on a journey to illustrate the distance pregnant and trans people have to travel to access reproductive and gender-affirming care.
These leaders and advocates rode together on the City of New Orleans train to Chicago. In Chicago, they developed strategies to ensure safe access to abortion and gender affirming care and formed vital connections with one another and local reproductive and LGBTQ+ healthcare providers and advocates. More...
The #MyLASexEd campaign was originally conceived and developed by the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies (IWES) and the Louisiana Youth For Truth council—a group of diverse young people who educate and advocate for inclusive, medically-accurate sex education through policy change, reforming cultural attitudes, and mobilizing youth. In partnership with IWES, Lift is expanding the campaign by engaging and mobilizing college students across the state and by providing students with information, tools, training, and resources to facilitate a campaign created by and led by students. Lift built a website that serves as a platform for students to share their stories about their experiences with sexual education in Louisiana and to access campaign resources and guidance for bringing this campaign to their college campuses. Lift launched the campaign in September 2017 in partnership with Students United for Reproductive Justice (SURJ) at Tulane University. (Visit the website at www.mylouisianasexed.info)
CPCs are fake women’s health centers that exist mainly to keep pregnant people from accessing abortion services. They disguise themselves as women’s health care facilities, but offer only limited and often medically inaccurate services. They often bill themselves as “pregnancy resource centers” and provide some services related to pregnancy and parenting, but are primarily focused on talking people out of getting an abortion.
In 2022, Lift Louisiana released, Funding Lies: Louisiana's Alternatives to Abortion Initiative Report 2022, which outlines the development and public funding of Louisiana’s Alternatives to Abortion Initiative, administered by the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), which diverts public dollars away from families in need and into crisis pregnancy centers.
According to a report released in May 2017 by the Guttmacher Institute, Louisiana is tied for second place when it comes to passing abortion restrictions that conflict with scientific evidence. In just the last five years, these restrictions have forced more than half the clinics in Louisiana to close their doors, leaving only three clinics open to serve nearly one million women of reproductive age in the state. As part of a multi-state effort to confront this problem, the National Partnership for Women and Families partnered with Lift Louisiana in May 2017 to launch a state-based “Lies into Laws” awareness campaign to encourage people to get the truth regarding abortion myths and to join Lift’s efforts to hold Louisiana’s lawmakers accountable for misinformed policies that restrict abortion access. Additional goals for the campaign included the following: To attract earned media; to send a message of accountability to Louisiana political and media elites; and to reach medical professionals around the anniversary of Whole Women's Health and remind them that lies becoming laws is bad for their profession. Overall, the campaign attracted almost 6,500 people to sign a petition, increased the size of Lift’s email list by 43 percent, and increased Lift’s Facebook page likes by 65 percent. This exceeded the original goals for translating visibility into online engagement.
The Lies into Laws campaign included online ads in The Advocate, social media ads, and billboards in Baton Rouge, Metairie, and New Orleans directing people to LiftLouisiana.org/Truth, a webpage containing an overview of the campaign; an online petition, a list of lies that are underlying state regulations; facts disspelling those myths; a link to LiesIntoLaws.org, the multi-state web resource hosted by The National Partnership for Women and Families; and the 2017 Issue Brief of Bad Medicine, a report by The National Partnership for Women and Families.
Links to Like-Minded Organizations
