Unlike 10 other U.S. states, Georgia voters didn’t have a chance to express their opinion on the state’s six-week abortion ban in the November election. Still, proponents of the Reproductive Freedom for All Act, are working to reintroduce the bill in the 2025 legislative session.
The bill aims to remove all restrictions on abortion and make it easier for people to access care.
To better understand the importance of including young people’s voices on reproductive health issues, Public Good News spoke with Aleo Pugh, Georgia communications and cultural strategies manager at URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity.
Pugh also shared about why partnering with storytellers and artists is important to the work URGE does to inform and engage youths on reproductive rights ahead of the 2025 legislative session and beyond.
Here’s what they said.
[Editor’s note: The contents of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.]
Public Good News: What is the aim of URGE and who does it serve?
Aleo Pugh: URGE is a young people’s organization focused on the South, Midwest, and California.
We focus on young, marginalized people between 18 to 30. So, people of color, queer and trans folks, women, low income people.
We recognize that, particularly when it comes to politics, there’s a lot of mythology around who young people are. There’s the idea that young people are not politically engaged or that they’re not particularly knowledgeable.
We’re working on inverting that narrative to say that, actually, these people have an astute understanding of history, the present, and what we need to do to change the future toward reproductive justice.
PGN: Can you share more about your campaign in support of the Reproductive Freedom for All Act?
A.P.: The biggest value of the Reproductive Freedom for All Act is that every Georgian should have the right to make their own personal medical decisions with dignity, without criminalization, and without interference from politicians.
Although we in the campaign are relatively familiar with the RFA and its goals, we have a lot of work to do in terms of making Georgians more broadly aware of this piece of legislation, and again, allowing them to expand what their conception of full abortion access looks like.
PGN: How do you help facilitate this as cultural strategies manager?
A.P.: I like to think of cultural strategies as how we use artistic mediums as a mode of changing culture by providing accurate information.
For instance, there’s data that reflects that about half of Georgians overwhelmingly support abortion. But there is still a need for culture shifting work, and we know that storytelling, art, media, particularly in this era of mis- and disinformation are really, really powerful modes of disseminating information.
One of the challenges of working in the South is it’s positioned as this kind of retrograde area. People don’t have a concept of what’s possible.
So by pushing forth the RFA— this really broad, sweeping legislation that’s pretty expansive and really pushes the boundaries around what reproductive health care access can look like—we’re saying Roe v. Wade was not enough.
You know, there are so many folks who were left out of access to abortion under Roe.
I’m thinking about the 1976 Hyde Amendment, for example, which prevented people who are on Medicaid from using those services for abortion.
We do a lot of digital content festivals where we pay young people to produce content. So, like TikToks, infographics, zines, poetry to show that young people are best able to communicate about their experiences and what they need.
You may be familiar with the two abortion ban-related deaths that happened in Georgia as a result of health care workers being in this place where they weren’t sure if providing a D&C would make them criminally liable. So, they kind of just put their hands up until it was too late.
The Reproductive Freedom Act makes sure that doctors and health care workers are able to follow best medical practices, and that their decisions are guided by the patient and what the patient knows their best interest to be—as opposed to fear.
PGN: What is the main message URGE works to promote?
A.P: The three pillars of reproductive justice that we promote and work to achieve are the right to have a family, the right not to have a family, and the right to safe and sustainable communities.
Our organization is led by the Black feminist framework of reproductive justice, which goes beyond abortion or even beyond what people immediately think about when they think of reproductive health care access.
So, any of those surrounding conditions that impact the ability to have or not have children, but also the circumstances that those children live in, the health care that they have access to, the schools that they have access to, those would all fall under the helm of reproductive justice.
Even when we talk about legislation like Roe, or like Medicaid access, there are ways that people are being cut out from these arenas.
We don’t truly have reproductive health care access until all of our communities, and not just people who are citizens, but also undocumented folks have access to that full range of reproductive health care access.
PGN: What advice would you give to health workers who want to include similar strategies in their work?
A.P.: The first thing that comes to mind for me is if you think this work is important, it’s really important to pay people for their time.
You know, exposure is very nice, but I think our ability to actually move monetary resources behind these folks really tells a lot about the level at which we value people’s contributions.
That level of investment that you’re putting behind that work will show up in the quality of work that they’re able to produce.
Also, taking an approach that really allows people to have flexibility and freedom is what we found we’re most successful with. Typically, we create parameters, like we want you to create content on this particular theme. And here are some ideas of different mediums that you can adopt, but giving them a level of flexibility with it as well.
It typically gives way to the most successful content and shows people that they have ownership over their story, how it’s packaged, how it’s conveyed.
Making sure that people, even if you’re hosting their content or it’s going up on your social media, still feel that intimate connection to their own story and know that it ultimately belongs to them.
Adriana Díaz is senior editorial manager at Public Good News. Adriana writes Community Voices, a biweekly newsletter for health workers responding to relevant health issues within their communities. Please send tips to adriana@publicgoodnews.com
Editor: Claudia Sanchez-Bustamante
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