Lauren Peterson is a senior advisor at Planned Parenthood Federation of America and speechwriter for the organization’s president, Cecile Richards. Peterson travels about the country with Richards, going to rallies, occasions – or wherever the politics necessitate.
I met Peterson at a Planned Parenthood occasion in San Diego last yr, when I spoke on a panel with Richards and Sarah Weddington (the attorney who argued Roe v Wade prior to the Supreme Court). Peterson had some things to say about careers in speechwriting (by way of the Obama administration), abortion politics (by way of Texas) and, of course, The West Wing – all although en route to Des Moines to mark the retirement of Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland.
How did you know you wished to go into speechwriting?
Following I graduated from college, I was actually into audio documentary – the sort of issue you’d hear on This American Lifestyle or All Items Considered. I would interview folks, then edit the interview into a piece for the radio. Which is how I discovered that I adore helping other people tell their stories – asking queries, listening to what they have to say, then creating some thing that displays their personality and their tips. And that’s essentially what speechwriting is.
You worked for the Obama campaign – can you talk about who you wrote for? What was that like?
I was on the digital group, so I wrote for everybody – from assisting the man who won “Dinner with Barack” and regretted not taking the French fry provided to him by President Obama (hi, Scott!), to sending an e mail to supporters, to writing video scripts for just about every person, to doing work on our website. I tweeted, blogged, produced audio pieces, realized from our remarkable speechwriting group and, best of all, traveled close to the nation to campaign rallies exactly where the president was speaking.
It could be aggravating at occasions – when you happen to be functioning on a campaign of that scale, you sometimes have to compromise on problems you genuinely care about. We had been all exhausted all the time.
And how did you begin doing work for Planned Parenthood?
I heard Cecile speak on the campaign trail in 2012, when she had taken time off to volunteer as a surrogate for President Obama. She had this hilarious top-ten checklist of the motives why females were absolutely going to make the big difference in the election, and why they need to assistance the president. As the campaign was wrapping up, men and women began asking me what I wished to do subsequent. I would say, “I want to work for a person like Cecile Richards!”
That turned out to be an real job posted on the Planned Parenthood website.
It truly is my knowing that there are not specifically a ton of female speechwriters. Why do you believe that is?
I feel like something else, it requires some bravado to break into speechwriting if you are not already there. And a disproportionate variety of the folks who are previously “there” are guys. I will say this: in my knowledge, they are exceptionally great, generous guys who understand that our discipline is not catching up to the rest of the globe as swiftly as any of us would like.
The 4 individuals who pushed me to try out my hand at speechwriting, who encouraged me throughout my work search, and who now reply my frantic emails with topic lines like “How do you compose a commencement speech?!” – they are all very talented feminist speechwriters … who occur to be men.
Right now, there is not exactly a lack of issues to write about when it comes to reproductive rights – particularly in areas like Texas and Louisiana, states exactly where abortion care may be completely obliterated. How do you stability relaying the urgency of these problems while nevertheless remaining upbeat and inspiring – not just in speeches, but in lifestyle … for your own sanity?
Two methods for this, each of which I blatantly stole from Cecile.
We invested a lot of final summer season in Texas, the place I noticed how desperate the circumstance is for ladies who dwell there and have to go to extraordinary lengths just to get basic health care or accessibility secure and legal abortion, which is – hello! – a constitutional correct and has been for a hundred% of the time I’ve been alive. At the exact same time, I also got to see men and women flip out by the 1000′s to rallies all above the state. … In states that undoubtedly do not make it effortless, individuals are performing extraordinary issues that inspire me even on the toughest days.
Two: I take a deep breath and a phase back and consider about how far girls truly have come. Much less than a hundred years ago, girls couldn’t even vote. I acquired the opportunity to function on a presidential campaign, and now I get to travel all more than the nation writing about women’s rights. Just in situation I neglect, I have a tattoo of the date of the ratification of the 19th Amendment on my wrist.
Poor science – like the erroneous hyperlink among abortion and breast cancer or mental overall health difficulties – has manufactured its way to policy. How do you see battle back towards that?
This by no means ceases to enrage me! You’re entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts, correct?! I think it is difficult for an individual without having a background in medication or science to come in and fact-check out the junk science that has been the justification for every thing from medically needless admitting privileges to mandatory “data” that physicians in some states need to distribute, by law, to women searching for an abortion.
What do you know now about speechwriting that you wish you would have acknowledged 5 years ago?
Five years ago I was functioning for the Wisconsin Film Festival, so I consider it truly is risk-free to say that every thing I knew about speechwriting at that stage in my daily life, I realized from Sam Seaborn.
What we speak about when we speak about abortion: truth, science and not the Texas way | Jessica Valenti
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