2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

This session presents excerpts from oral history interviews with health care providers and community members involved with the provision of reproductive and gender care in Minnesota, a state now referred to as a “refuge” or “safe haven” for essential health services. The presenters follow the excerpts with critical questions for the audience about the role oral history holds surrounding issues of reproductive healthcare, gender-affirming care, and reproductive justice.

ABSTRACT: With abortion and gender-affirming health care under sustained attack across the US, Minnesota has been publicly framed as a “refuge” for these health services. Our team consists of historians, a rhetorical critic, a medical provider, and a reproductive rights legal advocate. This interdisciplinary and community-focused project brings critical reflexivity to public discourses that exhort Minnesota as a “safe haven.” We gathered provider and community member experiences through oral history interviews. To promote those stories to the public, we produced a zine and developed a website.We will present excerpts from our oral history interviews and copies of the zine, reflecting on our approaches to the following questions: 1) How can oral history teams help fill gaps in the history of reproductive health and gender-affirming care? 2) How can oral history teams be active and collaborative participants in ongoing healthcare rights and equity questions?3) How do we build interdisciplinary research teams who may have reproductive justice expertise but lack method/methodological experience? 4) When histories of this moment are written in 50 years, what factors should we consider now when creating a longitudinal archive of stigmatized health histories? The excerpts for our listening session include stories from narrators working in sex education, gender-affirming care, and abortion-care provision throughout the region. We welcome feedback on our project’s ethical principles; the role oral history teams hold in connecting the past, present, and future of reproductive healthcare; and how to overcome tensions between holding space for narrators to tell their stories and asking questions that are relevant to audiences far into the future. Taken together, this project serves the human rights grounded tenets of reproductive justice as outlined by Sistersong–"the right to not have children, the right to have children, and the right to parent children in safe, sustainable communities."