This is one in a series of profiles marking the 60th anniversary of the ACLU of Kentucky’s founding.  Each week through December 2015 we will highlight the story of one member, client, case, board or staff member that has been an integral part of our organization’s rich history.

Dona Wells

“I think that people have to self-start, people have to have the goal and the willingness to make changes, to be sure that we don’t let the government or anybody else just roll over us.”

Watch our new video on the Reproductive Freedom Project featuring Dona Wells.

“I have always felt that women needed to have the right to control their own bodies,” Dona Wells explained. “Even growing up in a really kind of conservative town, I always thought it was crazy for women not to be able to control their own bodies and their own reproductive lives.”

Wells worked for years in Louisville abortion clinics, and with the ACLU, to ensure that Kentucky women would continue to have access to safe and legal abortions. She served on the search committee over and over when it was time to hire a new director for the ACLU-KY’s Reproductive Freedom Project (RFP) and used her experience and connections to make RFP as effective as possible in its reproductive rights work.

One of RFP’s main projects is to fight the anti-abortion bills that have a tendency to come up in the state legislature. RFP’s second director, Tina Hester, made building connections statewide a RFP priority and Wells was eager to help. “I was really helpful in that because I was also a member of Business and Professional Women,” she said. “How many times do you mention the ACLU and people are like, ‘Well that’s a radical organization’? Obviously, they don’t feel that way about Business and Professional Women.”

Hester and Wells’s goal was to have constituents of every state representative and senator in their contacts database. “Our state [government] was obviously more likely to listen to a constituent than to listen to someone else,” Wells explained. RFP’s work, which is based on those contact-building efforts, has largely been successful, and many attempts to eliminate or restrict women’s access to abortion in the state have successfully been stopped.

“The ACLU is totally instrumental. Every time we’ve got any kind of significant abortion rights, the state of Kentucky will always pass a law trying to deny those rights to women,” Wells said. “And of course, the ACLU was there every single time to go to court.”