Hello All,
We are thrilled to bring you an exciting update about At Your Cervix’s efforts to ban non-consensual intimate examinations!
VICTORY!
In addition to our work advocating for the passage of consent legislation in New Mexico we have been working on a campaign in Colorado, and late last week that bill - HB23-1077 - was signed into law, making Colorado the 23rd state to adopt consent legislation for intimate examinations!
This Colorado law is very special to us for two reasons. FIrst, it demonstrates that if we all continue fighting together, the movement to ban non-consensual intimate exams will succeed. We hope that this news will give you the much needed morale boost that it did us and inspire you to keep fighting until the same legislation is passed in New Mexico and in every other state yet to pass a law.
Secondly, the At Your Cervix team initiated the process and was a part of the coalition that wrote the Colorado bill, and had the privilege of bringing feedback from our entire community - including all of you - into that process. We - along with amazing legislators, advocates, activists, medical students, and other stakeholders - were able to write what became the strongest law in the country on this issue, and we hope it will now serve as a model law for other states. Among other things, this law provides whistleblower protections for students and staff that may witness a non-consensual exam (the first, and thus far, only, law to do so), requires consent for ALL intimate examinations (not just pelvic), and requires healthcare institutions to disclose exactly who - including students - will be performing any exam(s) to which a patient does consent.
A HUGE THANK YOU TO REPRESENTATIVE JENNY WILLFORD, who championed this bill from the beginning, and a very special thank you to Representative Lorena Garcia and Senators Faith Winter and Sonya Jacquez Lewis for co-sponsoring and playing a critical role in moving this process forward and over the finish line!
This good news comes at a time when opponents of such legislation are doubling down on the argument that non-consensual intimate exams no longer happen, but we know that they do. New research demonstrates that these exams are still being done on unconscious patients - in New Mexico and other states - for the purpose of student learning and practice, and that their use has only decreased 6% in the past 20 years. You can read it for yourself in the Journal of Surgical Education here.
We hope to be in touch with more good news soon! In the meantime, please keep contacting your state representative/senator to urge them to sign onto New Mexico’s bill as a co-sponsor and vote “Yea” when the time comes. And please keep contacting the legislator’s leadership and the governor’s office to urge them to support the bill as well. You can find all the relevant contact info below:
Find Your Legislators: https://nmlegis.gov/Members/Find_My_Legislator
Governor Michelle Luhan Grisham
490 Old Santa Fe Trail Room 400
Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 476-2200
Need Assistance from the Governor | Office of the Governor - Michelle Lujan Grisham (state.nm.us)
Speaker Javier Martinez
505-986-4782
javier.martinez@nmlegis.gov
Senator Mimi Stewart, President Pro Tempore
505-986-4734
mimi.stewart@nmlegis.gov
Senator Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
P.O. Box 40414, Albuquerque, NM 87196
505-986-4389
a.sedillolopez@nmlegis.gov
In solidarity,
A’magine + the At Your Cervix Team