THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Leslie Tarr Laurie

“I feel proud and energized with all that I was able to do to help move things along.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, December 2025

LWL:  My name is Leslie Tarr Laurie, and I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1947, March 29th.

JW:  Briefly, tell us a little about your childhood, like, before you got involved in the women’s movement.

LWL:  I feel really lucky because I did have really a truly wonderful childhood. I had great parents and who were progressive themselves. And my mother, at a time when lots of women basically, as they say, stayed home, became a college professor in philosophy. And my father was a businessman. I was thinking about kind of the political piece of this. And one of my memories in terms of activism with my mother was I remember going door to door campaigning for Adlai Stevenson with her. And my father was president of the PTA.

So they were always involved in that way. For them, it was really more civil rights. That was a key piece of what they were always interested in. And I had one brother who was a year and a half younger than me. My parents were very committed to education, and so I went to a private day school till I was in high school when we moved to another part of basically another part of Long island in Great Neck, and I went to the public high school there. One of my remembrances with high school. I was captain of this and that. I was very active there with the student association. I was one of the people who represented other students. But I also loved athletics, so I was captain of my tennis team and that kind of stuff.

JW:  And there was such a thing for girls then.

LWL:  There really was. But the part which I actually was thinking about not too long ago was I  did have a family that was like kind of, you could do anything idea for me. What I really remember was, as I was saying, I was a really great athlete, and my brother was a good athlete, too. And as a year and a half younger, he got to play Little League and I couldn’t. No girls. And that was really the first time. It was kind of like, what’s going on here?

I did go to summer camp, and again, it was, you know, an integrated summer camp. In New Hampshire. When my mother got her PhD, it was when my brother and I were little. And the kind of celebration for the family was we all went to Mexico. And it was fantastic. We drove quite a bit, and it began to open my eyes. Even though you could read about stuff, I mean, to be in a different environment where people spoke different languages and all of that, it was really pivotal in terms of me thinking about the world as a young kid.

JW:  When did you learn about the women’s movement?

LWL:  That was in high school. You’ll have a chuckle with this. I had to do a report, and I picked Margaret Sanger. And so my mother drove me into the city. It wasn’t a long trip. I had to go in myself. Into the Margaret Sanger Clinic in New York. I remember thinking, you know, got the information and all of that and really felt like, ooh, you know, could I. Was I really, like, supposed to be here? But it still felt good.

Margaret Sanger, despite some now who kind of see her as a eugenicist, she was really a very important figure in my life. And I always used for myself her phrase, no woman is free until, you know, you can control your fertility. Obviously, she said it in a different way, but that was important and felt like something that I kind of stayed with.

When I went to college, I went to a women’s college, and then when I did my graduate work, I came back to the city and went to Columbia. But the women’s college was really a key piece, too. Even though my mother had gone to Hunter College, which was a woman’s college. She wanted to go to the University of Chicago. And her parents, all my grandparents, were immigrants. My grandfather didn’t think it was right for a woman to go so far from home, so she went to Hunter College.

We talked about it, how different her life would have been if that was really possible. So, you know, she was very – and my father too – happy for me to go away to college, but my mother was like, why are you going to a small girl college. Hunter was not her favorite place, even though obviously she did well academically. But for me, I went to Chatham College, which was in Pittsburgh, and it was a way for me to really feel empowered as a woman.

So I was selected in my sophomore year to be one with about 100 from across the country who went to Malawi, Africa. It’s a wonderful project; with it was Crossroads Africa. And Malawi became a republic the summer I was there. So that was really eye opening too, in terms of the issues of black power. I was in a stadium, and I was one of literally a handful of whites. And it was just energizing and wonderful to witness a country’s independence.

I also was head of the National Student association when I was at Chatham. And because it was kind of key with the Vietnam War, I was also kind of the representative in the city of Pittsburgh. There were University of Pittsburgh and a number of colleges. And I represented Chatham because a peace torch was coming through. And for me, rather than the women’s movement, then, it was really the peace movement. That was the focal point of the outside activities that I was doing.

And so, you know, I went to SDS meetings. And in Pittsburgh, at my first SDS meeting, that’s where I met my husband. He was a graduate. So even that we, you know, we’re still together. So it was kind of interesting that it was politics that initially brought us together too. I thought he was cute besides. But so then when I was deciding, in a sense, what I was going to do after I graduated from college, I was deciding between should I be a lawyer or basically a community organizer.

And I decided that given what was going on in the world, and I had been active in RFKs campaign, and, you know, when he got shot, it was really a very difficult point. And so I decided that it was really community organizing and planning that I would go into. And so I applied to Columbia. I got in, and what I thought, especially with the issues of race at that point, as a white woman, what was in a sense, a good thing? How could I be most effective? And so I really felt it was with reproductive health and family planning.

It also was in my freshman year, my college roommate who came from – it wasn’t if she didn’t, in a sense, quote, know better, but she got pregnant. And this was pre-Roe. And so what I know we were close. She didn’t want her parents to know what was going on. And what I needed to do was, in a sense, to learn for the first time just how difficult it was to be able to get an abortion. But she had money, and eventually she did tell her parents, but we had been able to find ability for her to get an abortion in Pittsburgh. But it ended up making much more sense for her family that she not be in the United States. So she went to Puerto Rico.

JW:  You found a place in Pittsburgh, but her family didn’t want her to do it there?

LWL:  It was more that at that point, she felt she needed to tell her parents. She came from a very affluent family, and her parents wanted to help her get the abortion. They felt it was more secure that way, and that’s what they did. There was so much shame involved. Not so much from her, but from her family. That was a piece of it. And it was one of – but just such a key kind of event in my college life. And when we needed, you know, we – it wasn’t as if the college provided birth control. So I was need of birth control.

So I needed to go to a doctor in the city. And again, it was a humiliating experience. You know, why are, you know, the third degree? So again, I kind of felt that deeply. And so as I was figuring out how I could be effective, I really felt that wanting to work with reproductive health. And at that point, it was really more abortion and birth control. The first year that I was at Columbia, I needed to have a field placement. I wanted to be placed at Planned Parenthood.

They didn’t want me to be there. They said I needed to have a broader view of health. And even though at the time I was furious, it was the right decision. I worked at a neighborhood health center in the Upper west side of New York. And it was really wonderful because I got to see a broader view of what I would say, health. But it was very involved in terms of issues related to drugs. And I had to work on developing a community advisory board. Even though I felt like I knew the city because it was my city, I really learned about it in a very different way.

And then the second year, I did convince Columbia to let me work at Planned Parenthood. And Bruce, my husband, was working on his dissertation in Philadelphia. So I got to be a planned parent of Southeastern Mass. And I loved it. And I actually wrote the first Title X grant for Chester, Pennsylvania. I got to know Pittsburgh. Then I really got to know Philly.

Part of the reason I got married was because it was like, how could you be working on birth control if you weren’t married? And because Planned Parenthood, at that point, and that was the primary work that I did, if you were unmarried, you couldn’t get birth control. It must have been in 1970. And so my goal was that I was going to try to find a way that that could happen. And so with a social worker who was actually on staff, and she was African American and one who came from Philly and knew how important it was for people who were unmarried, too, to get birth control.

So what we were able to do, we had to go to the board, and it was a whole to do. And if what you were willing to do was to talk to a social worker, which was this Nancy Kirby, and she determined that basically, you knew what you were up to, you could then get birth control. But this was Planned Parenthood. This was kind of the real impetus for the abortion and family planning work. In addition to this field placement that I had at Planned Parenthood, we helped challenge the abortion law in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This wonderful woman, Phyllis Ryan, who was my age, it was something that we and a few others really worked on, and we worked with the law Project, too, at Penn. So Philadelphia was – I didn’t want to leave and thought when Bruce got a teaching job – he’s a labor historian at UMass in Amherst – I thought I would just fly back and forth. I did actually hire Dorothy Mann as a volunteer. I really fell in love with Western Mass.

Even though we had made strides In Philadelphia, when I came to western Mass, there were literally no clinics. If you were poor, you could go to a local OBGYN and show that you were really poor. And they were all guys at that point. They would decide. There were, you know, a number of practices scattered across western Mass, the 3,000 square mile area. And you would have to plead your case.

And there was a Planned Parenthood in Boston, and they called themselves Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts. So I was spunky enough. I went to them and said just that, you know, if you’re in western Mass, I’m happy to organize and see if we can write some grants. And they said yes. And so here I had an absolute community organizer’s dream, because they were far away.

And at that point, you know, western Mass is still seen as kind of a province. It’s not like the real city in Boston. And Massachusetts is one of the only places where the capital city and the big city is the same. And so, you know, so much really happens on the eastern part of the state. So they just let me do what I could, and it was fantastic.

The one thing that was something that I needed to just kind of deal with was this Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts felt that they couldn’t deliver services themselves because they felt they needed to be able to stand back and kind of evaluate the situations and also be an advocate. So I wrote grants. You know, got to really know the region and wrote grants first in Berkshire county for a family service agency. But I was seen as the “Planned Parent Person.”

Then [I] wrote with a woman who was working in a hospital in Springfield, a grant for the city of Springfield, the hospital there. And we wrote a grant. I wrote a grant for Franklin county, which is a bit north of where it’s basically northern western Mass, even though that sounds funny. And then Nixon put a hold on any more Title X. And the county that I was in was one in which we had not yet provided service.

We thought we were going to be able [to write grants] again. There was a community group that I worked with, and we had also started the idea was that this family service agency in Northampton would be able to be the recipient of the grant. And at the very last minute, right before Nixon’s basically hold was going to be on, we thought this was going to be able to get through the board, but unfortunately, the woman who was the president of the board was married to the OBGYN in town. And he was afraid that if a clinic started, he would lose money. So it was like, put off. And that meant there was going to be no service.

And that ended up being the impetus. And our regional HHS people were very sympathetic to wanting services to be provided. And so what they were willing to do was to provide a bit of money so we could regionalize the three grants that we already had. And they were going to throw in a little bit more to cover the county. And so I did do the organizing with two others to submit a regional grant for Western Mass. And that became the Family Planning Council of Western Mass. That was in 73.

And I was hired to be the CEO and then stayed the head of that organization for 40 years.  Organizing was always a feature of what I did. And I got to understand, as I was saying to you, Judy, that Western Mass had no power. And so people in Boston didn’t know the difference between Amherst or Athol. And there were other Title X grants that had been granted so that there were different organizations across the state. And I’ll do this in a shortcut way.

What was able to happen was we were able to create an organization that was the Family Planning association of Massachusetts. Massive family planning association. I became chair for many, many years. And what that afforded us was one voice for the state. So we were able to work with the state legislators, and we hired a lobbyist over the 40 years and were able to get additional state dollars in addition to the Title X, especially because Title X was going up and down.

Title X is a domestic grant program, and it is the only domestic family planning program in the United States. And it was started by a Republican, Richard Nixon, in 1973. And it has provided what I would say is the entree to health care for many, many millions of women. And the idea was that because of the Civil Rights act of ’64, one couldn’t discriminate in terms of age or marital status. So anyone was able to come to a Title X clinic and there were prescribed services.

It wasn’t, in a sense, just providing birth control pills. There were doctors that were employed. And so the idea was, if you were going to get birth control, we needed to make sure that you were healthy enough to get birth control. So women got Pap smears and breast exams and were provided over time with sexually transmitted disease screening. And for the organization, Tapestry, Family Planning Council of Western Mass. And we had those direct title X all of those many years.

And it did become a political football all through that time – even though [we had] Title X – because of actually a Massachusetts congressman who at the end made sure that no dollars could be spent on abortion services. And so Title X never provided abortion services. And one would have thought that even those who were against abortion would have supported Title X birth control. But that did not become the case. It became a political football, and we’re seeing that now. And was there age restrict? Not age? Well, yeah, I should say age or income restrictions on who could get it.

What was wonderful about Title X [was] there weren’t age or income restrictions. And so it wasn’t seen as, quote, unquote, poor service. Anyone was able to come. And most Title X programs had a sliding fee scale, so depending on the size of someone’s family and how much they made, that’s how much they would pay.

JW:  So there was help according to what income you had?

LWL:  Exactly. And over time, in a state like Massachusetts, we were also able to get Medicaid, another funding source that provided resources for the organization that provided the service, in my terms, Tapestry Health, so that we could provide more and more services to more people. There was never enough money with Title X to be able to provide all of the people who wanted the services to come, especially when the AIDS epidemic happened, because we did provide confidential services.

So in other words, if an angry husband would come to one of our clinics, the information as to whether his wife was coming for services was, in a sense, none of his business. And similarly, in terms of parents, if there was a teenager who was coming for birth control services, we saw it as a responsible action for a young woman to come and want to use birth control. So in addition to not providing those kinds of services to parents, we would talk to parents. We had educational programs to help parents and others understand what was key about birth control. And Title X also provided educational services. So we went into schools to educate.

JW:  Where did the name Tapestry come from?

LWL:  Oh, you’ll crack up. So we were the Family Planning Council of Western Mass for many years. And because we were providing so many other services, for me, what became key is if we were saying we should provide services to a woman so that she could decide when and if she wanted to have a kid, when she wanted to have a kid, we should make sure that it was really a healthy kid.

We got grants so we could do WIC services which provided, food for lactating women and babies up to the age of five. And we also ran a teen pregnancy school with a daycare center for similar kinds of reasons, hoping that we could help with parenting skills and also get teen parents to get their GEDs to help with more possibilities in life. And when AIDS happened, because we were providing confidential services, we became the kind of key place.

And this was also partially because Corey Richards, who I think you knew from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, was really one of my closest friends. And I was on the board of AGI at that point. It’s now called Guttmacher. And his first partner got very, very sick with AIDS. And he was working in the Commerce Department in a very high position, and Peter was his name. And Peter ended up sadly dying of AIDS.

And what I saw, though, was that in order for him to have health services, the people who he was working with basically provided their vacation days so that Peter could still keep working. And again, everything was really closeted with that. And so I got to see AIDS very, very early. Peter died very early in the epidemic. And when I had my daughter in ’85, Corey was like her godmother. And so we went down to D.C. I testified. I was very active with the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. I testified many times in Congress before I had Becca. And then when I had Becca, I brought her down.

And Peter, this was before he died. So Becca got to know him and obviously knew Corey. And she was really, really tiny. And so the first time she testified, she could barely, you know, she could say chicken parmesan. But it was like, what you have to say is, give more money to family planning. So there she was, you know, sitting on my lap, and she got to say, ‘give more money to family planning’.

Congressman Conti, who was on the Appropriations Committee, where I was testifying, was the minority head of the committee. And he came from Western Mass. He insisted that Becca’s comments be in the Congressional Record. So she’s the youngest one that’s ever been. And so we have those records. When the AIDS quilt was happening, you know, Becca and I made a panel for Peter, which then, you know, got to be part of the big quilt. And over time, it made sense to think about getting the quilt to come to Western Mass. And so I helped make that happen.

But in terms of services, the Tapestry got to be the first place to do anonymous HIV testing. And the reason the name Tapestry happened was because we were so much more than family planning. We did a lot of PR that said just that we do a lot more than family planning. But then it made more sense to change the name. And we had all kinds of people try to come up with names, and we couldn’t agree on anything. And then finally, our assistant director, Allison Jones, every day would come, and she would look in a dictionary, and when it got to Tapestry…

JW:  You did want to talk about the Natural Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. Tell us about how you got involved in that.

LWL:  I guess what I really believed always was we would never have, as a community of family planners, enough money to provide the services that we really needed. And how could we make sure when there were attacks like with Reagan. There were enormous attacks to try to change these Title X grants that came directly from the federal government to private agencies primarily, even though some health departments across the country.

What Reagan wanted to do was to block grant the money so it would go directly to the states, and then the states could decide what they would spend. And we all, you know, knew what that really meant was kind of a death knell for many states. I mean, sadly, similarly to what’s exactly happening now. So this does feel like the nightmare that I was afraid was going to happen, we’re sadly living through now.

So in addition to working on the state level to get state dollars, and again, Massachusetts, at one point, with the exception of, like, a handful of legislators, everyone was Catholic. And the Catholic Church was very, very, you know, strong and important. So to get birth control support was – even though everyone thinks now, if Massachusetts is so progressive with the issues of sexuality, it never was. And so it was a real fight. So we needed to organize and politically, you know, make our case.

And, of course, that made sense, too, nationally. And so the Family Planning Forum, I was there. Actually there were a few people who were interested in a national organization, and I thought it was a great idea. And it was called the Family Planning Forum. Over time, it really evolved to become the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. So I feel like, you know, I was kind of at the beginning of that and because I did have a quasi academic background because of, you know, my mother, my husband.

When it was a big conference, it was like, what do you mean? We need to have speakers. So it was like, we need to be more legit and a reason for people to come, in addition to just lobbying on the Hill. And so the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health association evolved over time and has become, over time, the key voice for the Title X program and family planning programs across the country. I was the chair of the Public Affairs Committee and just love the politics of all of that. And then I did also become the president of the National Family Planning Association.

JW:  The president of the board?

LWL:  Yes, the board. And at that point, Bill White was the head of Family Planning and a real advocate. He really had a sense of how important this program was and also the Community Health center program. So he was able to provide economic support to NFRA, the National Family Planning Reproductive Health association, and also the Community Health Center Association. And so both of those organizations, I really give this one public servant so much credit for why these organizations were able to survive and then now flourish. And it was really White.

JW:  And where was he placed?

LWL:  He was the director of Family Planning for the federal government, Washington. And he actually became Dorothy Mann’s husband. Bill White and I, he understood that, in a sense, everything shouldn’t come from Washington, that people should go out. And so what I got to do with him was conferences were set up in different regions so we could speak to people and basically help organize and energize this organization. I now, kind of coming full circle.

After 40 years, I left, helped organize the first medical cannabis dispensary in Massachusetts West. And initially I got involved because of Tapestry, because I thought this would be a really great – you know, we’re always looking for money – a great revenue source, and then for a whole bunch of reasons, it couldn’t happen. And so the reason I was interested in cannabis was because of the racial disparity as to who was really in jail. You know, the numbers were really staggering.

You know, if you were a white suburban Kid, you know, you weren’t going to be locked up. If you were a black kid in Springfield, you were going to be locked up. So to me, legalization really made sense. So I worked on that in terms of the referendum question. And then it became really just exciting to do. And instead of having to worry about an enormous region, I just had to worry about a city. And really, that was very, very exciting. And then did the same thing with recreational [cannabis]. And then I did that.

You know, it took quite a number of years to make it all happen and really exciting, you know. You know, to be the first and to do that. And, you know, the PR that I had learned from Tapestry for family planning, I got to use really very easily. And then I also helped the first GROW. You know, just actually GROW in Massachusetts. I won’t get into the detail because this is family planning. For a medical dispensary, it had to be vertically integrated.

So that meant you needed to grow the plants, to processing them and then sell them. And it was a way of limiting the numbers but also ensuring that what was given to patients was really legit. And in Massachusetts everything had to be laboratory tested. And for me, this really ended up working well in terms of health because I did have a stroke and I got Crohn’s disease. Initially they thought I had cancer, so I guess it was better. But that’s not all it was. But I had to have surgery.

And in what has been found is that one of the really helpful treatments for Crohn’s is cannabis. And in Massachusetts, in order to be certified as a medical patient, there are a few illnesses that are legit. I do have to get an infusion every month, so it’s not as if it’s all alternative medicine, but I really knew that that was something that was going to be helpful. And then, you know, as someone who’s always been kind of involved in health, I really just so appreciated, again, being one to one with people where, you know, so many came in. There’s a big VA very close to where the [dispensory is]. In the city of Northampton. And so there were lots of vets who were coming in with PTSD. And again, cannabis is really helpful for that.

What I was about to do for the first time in my life at 78 was to feel like I really had like a free schedule. Free in the sense that I could decide that I wanted to zoom with you. And then with the just awfulness and cruelty of this administration currently, I felt that I needed to do something. And what I was asked to do with NFRA is there’s a kitchen cabinet and we got to name it Gray Matters. And it’s a few people who basically are helping Claire Coleman. And also being a bit of a cheerleader would be the way that I would say it for one person, George Hill, who runs the main family planning program.

And he won because of the cruelty of Trump’s so called great bill if it was aimed at Planned Parenthood. But because Maine Family Planning provides so much Medicaid services, including primary care, they provided more than $800,000 of Medicaid services. And so they were one of a non-Planned Parenthood organization that was prevented from getting Medicaid services for an entire year. That’s about to come up. And so what George needed to do was to basically close down the primary care services so that they’d be able to continue.

And so I’ve been really a cheerleader for him. Anything I can do to help Maine is something that I’m trying to. And then just the whole sense now of the issues here in a place like Western Mass, of immigrants who are undocumented and the fear of being able to continue to live here. So it’s just a time where, you know, as we started, especially for family planning, when I know now that in Texas if you are a teenager, you can’t get birth control without your parents permission.

And I feel like in 1970, when I was doing that in Philadelphia, I thought this is ridiculous. And now it’s 2025 and there we are. So it’s, it’s been such a similar trajectory. And you know, some really see it as dialectic, you know, step forward, step back, step forward. But this feels like just such an enormous step backward. And because, you know, I did work in Ghana for a bit, international work is also important to me. And the idea that, you know, USAID is cut and knowing that no so many, you know, for 25 cent pill of hi, you know, to prevent HIV, that we’re preventing that. It’s just such a sobering time. I feel proud and energized with all that I was able to do to help move things along.

JW:  I will say that I am working with young women on this, another project I won’t get into, and they give me hope because there are these young women in their 20s, and they are bright and energetic and, on the move, and I have hope that things will turn around.

LWL:  And where I live, we’re really energized with younger women.

JW:  Yeah. That’s great.

LWL:  The only clinic in the whole country that’s a transgender clinic is in Northampton, so Massachusetts. I feel protected in a way.