During these years, I delivered keynote addresses at the first national women’s conferences on the new reproductive technologies in Germany, Austria, Spain and Australia. In frequent trips to Germany and Austria, I gave speeches in German. (In Hannover, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Sexualforschung once gave me a standing ovation—not for what I was saying— but for managing to pronounce three foot-long German words in a row.)
At the invitation of the World Health Organization, I chaired a five-day meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark where “technodocs” and techno-critics conducted a stormy evaluation of in vitro fertilization (IVF).
In Paris, I debated a leading IVF physician before an audience of some 2,000 technodocs at the opening plenary session of their 7th World Congress on In Vitro Fertilization and Assisted Procreation.
The Law Reform Commission of New South Wales in Sydney and the Victoria Law Reform Commission in Melbourne flew me to Australia to address them on the regulation of the new reproductive technologies.
In February 1999, Dr. Klagsbrun invited me into Fontaine House of Correction to teach with her a workshop on Focusing. I have been continuing that work on my own ever since. I have been documenting my inner explorations with the same care reviewers noted when they characterized my books as “massively” researched and documented. I keep records of my every dream, Focusing session, inner adventure. This research, little of which becomes visible, is the earth in which I planted my work with prisoners, grounding and nourishing that work.
I began bringing prisoners out of the shadows. I am now working directly with men who have committed violence against women—rape, battery, murder. As I did with women, I am listening to the men, putting their words, experiences and reality out into the world. I watch their own naked faces emerge as they drop a series of false masks including the “tough guise” of masculine stereotypes.
I carry words.
My skill and my passion is listening empathically to people living in difficult circumstances, people who, sensing that I care about them, open to me and speak. Over the years, these people have been women in a male-dominated medical system; blacks fearing an imminent massacre in Moutsee, South Africa during apartheid; Catholics and Protestants enduring the violence of the “Troubles” in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Palestinians in a camp on the West Bank; convicts in a prison program called Growing Together. I listen to them. Then I carry their words to others in the hope that they too will care.
My magazine articles have been published in The Progressive, Ms., Commonweal, Mother Jones and Omni. In addition, The New Republic’s feature syndicate published 75 of my columns.
My work confronts me with suffering. What brings me joy in the midst of this sorrow is African dance. For many years I have danced and drummed in Senegal and performed with the director of the Senegalese Black Soofa dance troupe, Caro Diallo. Each year for a decade Diallo has traveled to the United States to dance at the Abene African Dance Festival I launched in Brattleboro, Vermont in 2003.
With four other feminists, I founded the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) and organized the Women’s Emergency Conference on the New Reproductive Technologies, held in Vallinge, Sweden in 1985.
I was also co-founder, with Janice Raymond and Jeremy Rifkin, of the National Coalition Against Surrogacy. We held press conferences and testified at numerous hearings in opposition to the legalized sale of women’s bodies for reproductive purposes.
Traveling the world as a feminist activist, I gave speeches and media interviews throughout the U.S. and Europe and in Brazil, Bangladesh, Nicaragua, Australia and South Africa. My fluency in German and Spanish and working knowledge of French aided me in my travels.
