A capacity crowd filled the seats at Stillpoint in West Tisbury last week for Our Bodies, Not Yours — a two-hour panel discussion with four professionals at the forefront of the movement to preserve women’s reproductive rights and access to abortions.

“All these women are warriors,” said Terre Young of Martha’s Vineyard Sexual Wellness (MVSwell), the long-established Island nonprofit formerly known as Friends of Family Planning, as she introduced panelists from both on and off the Island.

Nyssa Duarte, clinic nurse and wellness coordinator for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) who also works with medicinal plants in her Noepe Wellness business, was joined on the dais by Dr. Maureen Paul, medical director for the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project; Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukhaga, founder and director of the Center for Black Women’s Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice at Tufts School of Medicine; and Claire Teylouni, a senior director at the Boston-Based nonprofit Reproductive Equity Now.

Documentary filmmaker, attorney and seasonal Vineyard resident Dawn Porter moderated the two-hour conversation, which ranged from state and federal policies restricting maternal autonomy, to new Massachusetts legislation that protects clinicians providing abortion pills across state lines.

“When people have to carry undesired pregnancies...it’s really risky,” said Dr. Paul, who traced the erosion of women’s reproductive autonomy going back to the 1976 Hyde Amendment restricting federal funding for abortions.

By the time Supreme Court abolished the constitutional right to an abortion with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022, more than 1,300 state laws had already been passed to limit access to the procedure, she said.

Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukhaga, PhD, Dawn Porter, Dr. Maureen Paul, Clair Teylouni, Nyssa Duarte, RN.

Ray Ewing

Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukhaga, PhD, Dawn Porter, Dr. Maureen Paul, Clair Teylouni, Nyssa Duarte, RN.

Ray Ewing

These laws are actively harming women, Dr. Paul said, citing a ProPublica report on emergency room physicians in states where abortion has been criminalized, who have refused to help women suffering miscarriages or other complications from pregnancy.

“We already know of five people who have died... either because of bleeding or of overwhelming infection, because they were turned away from life-saving care,” she said.

State laws criminalizing abortion are reducing the availability of care for all women, Dr. Paul said.

“Clinicians are fleeing states with abortion bans... and that, of course, is exacerbating the crisis in black maternal mortality that we have in this country,” she said.

Women of color have long suffered from inadequate maternal health care, said Ms. Amutah-Onukhaga and Ms. Duarte, both of whom decried the tendency of mainstream medicine to disregard communities of culture.

“I worked in a big hospital... in Boston, and it was soul-sucking to just see the lack of holistically-treated patients,” Ms. Duarte said. “Even just regular patients — outside of women’s care — are not treated holistically in the health care system, so I just really wanted to return home and be able to take care of my people better and reconnect with the land and our medicines.”

The lack of procedural, as opposed to medical, abortions on Martha’s Vineyard is a hardship for all Island women and even more so for those who are Wampanoags, Ms. Duarte said.

“It’s a really big deal for us to have to travel,” she said.

“We all understand the physical and financial burden to take time off work and just plan and travel alone, and I think it’s compounded in my community because we really rely on community aftercare for our people... our aunties, our sisters, our grandmothers, people checking in on us after; [a] fire ceremony, cooking for each other,” Ms. Duarte said.

Ms. Amutah-Onukhaga, who holds a PhD and works with graduate students at the Tufts medical school, concurred with Dr. Paul and Ms. Duarte.

“Everything that my colleagues have said today is absolutely true and compounded for Black women,” said Ms. Amutah-Onukhaga, who last year worked for the passage of the so-called Momnibus Bill, a legislative package signed by Gov. Maura Healy that increases access to midwives, doulas and other maternal care outside of hospital settings.

Ms. Teyloumi also worked to pass a key state bill, the Massachusetts SHIELD law, which allows clinicians in the commonwealth to prescribe abortion pills — a dual dose of mifepristone and misoprostol — anywhere in the country regardless of laws in the recipient’s state. Enacted in 2022, the bill protects Dr. Paul’s organization and other prescribers who send the pills across state lines.

But the medication — like procedural abortion — faces legal opposition at the federal level, she said.

“It is really concerning that we see these challenges to the FDA’s [Federal Drug Administration's] approval of mifepristone continuing to proliferate,” Dr. Paul said.

As a safeguard, she said, Governor Healy has authorized the purchase of a stockpile of the medications.

“We have, I think, almost two years’ worth of doses of mifepristone available and ready to disseminate to providers, should those restrictions come through,” Dr. Paul said.

The medication has been proven safe and is largely complication-free, she said, but the Massachusetts Medical Abortion Project provides remote clinical support for patients who experience side effects.

As a sovereign nation, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) has the right to keep its own stock of medical abortion pills, Ms. Duarte told the Stillpoint audience. But Wampanoag women need more than abortion services, she said, calling for a revival of pre-colonial tribal governance and the restoration of land.

“What we need most on the Island is a return to matriarchy, [and] re-matriation should be and needs to be the center of reproductive justice — because you can’t remove people from their land and expect to have better health outcomes,” Ms. Duarte said.

For more information from Martha’s Vineyard Sexual Wellness, visit mvswell.org.