Aspen Ideas Festival

In 2019, I partnered with the Aspen Global Innovators Group and Aspen Ideas Health to prepare their Healthy Community and New Voices fellows from countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, India, Rwanda, Liberia, and here in the United States to make complex narratives about abortion, HIV/AIDS, malaria, contraception, menstruation, and maternal mortality easy for everyday people to understand.

I met a woman named Tabitha who after years of working as a corporate lawyer in Kenya, quit her job and started defending women who are criminalized for having abortions. Abortion is illegal in Kenya. So, every day, 320 Kenyan women are hospitalized, and seven die as a result of procuring illegal abortions.

Where corrupt governments fail to intervene— or more likely are the cause of the suffering— tireless organizers, advocates, lawyers, doctors, and researchers like Tabitha are innovating on ways to save people's lives and create the conditions for more health equity and dignity.