Skip to content Skip to footer

Meet Three Grandmothers on the Front Lines of Health Care Movements

These three grandmothers are expanding health care in their communities.

Judy Kahrl
Maine grandmothers lobby for reproductive rights

Judy Kahrl may be 82 years old, but the Maine resident is still concerned with the barriers that surround reproductive health care. “Access to contraception and the ability to control fertility empowers women,” Kahrl says.

That’s why Kahrl founded GRR! — Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights. The group of nearly 100 Maine grandmothers lobbies for access to contraceptives, abortion, and sex education.

The issue is personal for these women, who came of age in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, when access to reproductive health care was severely limited. Kahrl says all group members have stories of sisters or cousins “disappearing” to get abortions or have babies. They don’t want their daughters and granddaughters to face those same barriers and stigmas.

Being a grandmother advocating for reproductive rights has its advantages. Group members, with their “wrinkled faces and yellow T-shirts,” as Kahrl puts it, draw attention from media and legislators in Maine’s capital. Last year the group scored a victory when a bill to expand pregnancy testing, contraception, and STD treatments to low-income residents became law.

“Grandmothers have a lot of power,” Kahrl says.

Mary Lyons
Ojibwe elder takes on fetal alcohol syndrome

Some 22 years ago, great-grandmother and Minnesota Ojibwe elder Mary Lyons received a call: A 6-month-old boy crippled by fetal alcohol syndrome wasn’t expected to live long. Could Lyons, an advocate for indigenous children affected by alcohol, take care of him in his final weeks?

Lyons had fostered many children and had adopted six. The work was emotionally taxing, and she was ready to be done. Yet she knew she couldn’t say no. The baby, Chauncey, is now 22, and Lyons’ adopted child. He’s a testament to her commitment to helping children affected by fetal alcohol syndrome live full lives, and to keeping indigenous families together.

The battle is personal for Lyons: She was one of many Native American children removed from their families and placed in institutions decades ago. Alcohol was one coping mechanism her generation turned to, she says.

That’s why it’s not just children Lyons fights for. A winner of the Minnesota Congressional Angels in Adoption Award, Lyons gives lectures as a United Nations active observer and supports women as a grandmother counselor for sobriety group Women of Wellbriety, International.

“Women, when they rise up together, they can rule mountains,” she says.

Zodwa Hilda Ndlovu
Food and housing for Cape Town HIV orphans

Zodwa Hilda Ndlovu — or “Mama Zodwa,” as she likes to be called — recognized the AIDS crisis in her South African community when her daughter died of the disease and her HIV-positive son committed suicide out of shame. Fear of talking about these issues, she decided, was simply too dangerous.

In 2001, she began running a soup kitchen out of her home to feed children who were left orphaned when their parents died of AIDS. Now named Siyaphambili — which means “going forward” — the nonprofit has turned into a sort of village in Cape Town that provides food and housing for orphans and facilitates healing conversations among families about HIV.

Mama Zodwa, who is HIV-positive, says she does this work so that other people don’t lose their children to shame and hopelessness. She believes open discussion is crucial to destigmatizing the disease and teaching prevention, and grandmothers are in unique roles to affect change as community elders. “In the future, I would like to see everybody treat HIV as a normal disease,” she says, explaining that too often sufferers are cast aside or too afraid to admit they need help. And Mama Zodwa hopes for a day when Africa is eventually free of AIDS.

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re shoring up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy