The Guiding Star Project has been getting a lot of email inquiries and other activity lately, so much in fact that we are having trouble keeping up with it all! I of course am excited about the Guiding Star Project’s mission, but it’s cool to see so many others excited about it too. I can’t speak for why the others are getting excited about Guiding Star, but here are a few reasons why I am.
1. Guiding Star promotes collaboration. We work with existing organizations to provide care that meets the various needs of women. Our demographic isn’t just women experiencing unplanned pregnancies, or just women looking for holistic alternatives to women’s healthcare. Our demographic is ALL women. GSP wants to meet the needs of every day people to support and empower them to make healthy choices for themselves and their families. And this is the beauty of collaboration. No one can be specialists in everything, but by bringing together the various components of providing women with life-affirming care, and working with various agencies that specialize in a particular aspect of pro-woman care, women will be able to access crisis pregnancy help, natural fertility education, special needs help, lactation help, drop off child-care, and more in one place. There are so many organizations that are doing really great things for women, and by bringing great organizations together into one shared office space in a Guiding Star Center, Guiding Star enables these organizations to continue doing what they do well and do it with less overhead since rent, utilities, and office equipment can be shared among the organizations in a Guiding Star Center. Furthermore, more women can know about each organization within a Guiding Star Center since they will all be located within the same space. The woman who may need crisis pregnancy help today, may need lactation help or fertility education tomorrow.
2. Guiding Star is broad in its thinking. I love that in enabling great organizations to work together, Guiding Star is able to address the myriad ways that femininity is belittled. I feel that one end result of the cultural degradation of women is abortion, but the decision to abort doesn’t begin with an unplanned pregnancy. It begins when menstruation is shameful; when girls and women are taught that their bodies are burdensome and they should praise science for allowing them to cast it aside with contraception, and indeed that they CANNOT be equal unless they change their natural functioning. It begins with the sexualization of young girls. It begins when around every corner and at every milestone of becoming a woman, a girl learns that her body and how it works is broken and if she’s ever going to accomplish anything with her life, she needs to bring it into submission. It begins when a woman who is already a mother is feeling stretched and the knowledge that she is expecting another is absolutely overwhelming when simple tasks like going to her doctor’s appointments is very difficult when it means she has to find a babysitter for her other children in order to go. Thus, The Guiding Star Project doesn’t just address abortion, but contraception, birthing practices, women being shamed for breastfeeding, and the simple ways the challenges of motherhood are compounded when families have little or no support.
3. The Guiding Star Project is clearly Pro-Woman. GSP celebrates femininity and addresses many issues facing women, but they do it without crass, without sarcasm, but WITH authority because they speak the truth about women, that women are awesome just the way we are. Women shouldn’t have to risk our health and our lives with chemicals, devices, and surgeries in order to be equal. We ARE equal now. We have always been equal. If inequality exists because of the way that our bodies function, the solution is not to change ourselves. The solution is to change the culture.
And I, for one, am so happy that organizations like The Guiding Star Project exist that are working to change the culture and really resonate with others who are doing the same.
photo credit: Senator Kate Lundy via photopin cc