Meet Park Cannon, The 28-year-old Georgia State Representative Fighting To 'Make Our Democracy Better'

By Jessica Suriano


Georgia has lawmakers who have attempted to push through some of the most repressive anti-abortion legislation in the nation, a governor accused of undermining voter access, along with a history of fear-inducing anti-immigration policies — however it also has Park Cannon.


While in her first term because the youngest woman and youngest Democrat to serve the state’s general assembly, the now-28-year-old Georgia state representative and self-described “activist elected official” wrote legislation that pushed for medically accurate HIV and AIDS prevention to be included in school sex education; expanded protections against discrimination of sexual assault victims; recommended a state constitutional amendment that would permit 17-year-olds to vote in state elections; called for comprehensive state civil laws that would protect people from discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations, and more. She also protested the contentious charges that were taking over her state, most notably one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation. While pro-choice policy might be hard to pass in Georgia, where Republicans control both the state Residence and Senate, that hasn’t deterred Cannon from seeking equality in reproductive healthcare — or from standing up for everything else she believes in, too.


Her passion is also personal: she's a queer Black woman who has experienced homelessness. She is the daughter of a Vietnam War veteran, and wants more affordable housing for veterans and people living with HIV. She's a doula, a trained individual who assists the others during pregnancies or terminated pregnancies; has received an abortion herself; and wants to make sure reproductive justice for all the people living in her state. She understands she's not alone in her circumstances, and she is aware life can be easier for the 10.5 million people who reside in her state.


“Like several other people In the
U.S., I have seen the perfect and worst,” she told MTV News. “It is a human right for anyone have the ability to feel as though they're living in a safe community, parenting in a place where they have resources, and mobilizing towards a higher end version of themselves.”


Her firsthand experiences may have solidified her choice to run for the initial time in 2016, nevertheless it was the former representative for District 58, Simone Bell, who planted the idea in her brain. At the time, Cannon was working as a health supporter at the Feminist Health Center, where she consistently interacted with Bell through their parallel policy objectives. “One of the things that was really essential to me was to think about what’s missing in the chamber and what’s missing in the conversations — what’s missing in a seat for someone who can actually vote?” Bell told The Georgia Voice. “That’s how I began thinking about who could be a particularly good person in this position. And Whenever I called Park, I thought about reproductive justice and what she may bring to that conversation.”


Cannon beat opponent Ralph Long III by 18 points in a runoff election in 2016, and in 2018, won her seat in a landslide. She believes that the 2020 election will be key for voters showing up to the polls, in part because it is a census year, which means there really is a possibility for elected officials to balance state funding into causes that merit more financial support.


One of these key causes for Cannon is maternal mortality prevention. Georgia’s maternal mortality rate is one of the highest in the nation — almost twice high because the national rate — and the risk of pregnancy-related deaths for Black females is three to four times higher than that of their white counterparts. With 2019’s House Resolution 447, Cannon and a few other representatives are seeking to provide $10 million to study the causes of infant and maternal mortality and to make design a commission that would suggest solutions. In practice, Cannon mentioned she plans to dig deeper into how much the hospitals in her district are sharing toward prenatal services, if people pursuing medical school can be adequately trained and afford to accomplish their educational programs, and if the charges of delivery in a Georgia hospital are also high.


Such healthcare reforms are also intrinsically tied to the conversation surrounding abortion access, and by extension, healthcare as a whole. “People should not only seek reproductive health and reproductive rights, yet they should have access to reproductive justice,” she told MTV News. “In categorize to have access to reproductive justice there really are really four tenants of that: that indicates that you have the correct to parent, the correct to not parent, the correct to stay in a safe community, and the correct to bodily autonomy.”


As soon as Governor Brian Kemp signed the fetal heartbeat abortion law in May, he touted it as a “declaration that all life has value” and that “all life is worthy of protection” in the state of Georgia. Meanwhile, according to the most recent information obtainable, approximately 62 Black mothers per 100,000 live births in Georgia perish and the state had almost 14,000 children in foster care as of May of this year. In addition, 20 people in Georgia have been fatally shot by police in 2019 for now) The law was temporarily blocked from taking effect by a federal judge, however its long-term future remains unclear.


And Cannon believes that reframing the Georgia General Assembly’s demographics is key in ensuring that such laws become few and far between. Ladies comprise slightly more than half of the state population, yet far less than one-third of elected officials in its General Assembly are ladies, and only about 16 percent are females of color. Five members — roughly 2 percent — are openly LGBTQ+; per the latest census. “What we know is that most of them of the people who are elected to the state now are males over reproductive age who are not of color,” she told MTV News. “And so they do not even involve themselves with or work with any of the people who need to access this specific reproductive healthcare service.”


In the meantime, Cannon and then some of her colleagues have drafted expenditures that would appoint females to regulate men’s reproductive health as a way to underscore the necessary for parity in the lawmaking process. One of those, HR 498, offered the creation of an all-women committee to study erectile dysfunction and suggest any new legislation about it. Another, HB 618 or the “Vanishing Viagra Act,” would remove Viagra from the prescription advantages of state employees’ health insurance. And Dar’shun Kendrick of the 93rd district wrote an entire legislative package called the “Testicular Bill of Rights,” which recommended banning vasectomies and requiring cisgender males to get permission from a sexual partner before seeking a Viagra prescription; the package was intended to show what regulation of male cisgender bodies and reproductive choices would look like from a legislative standpoint.


Cannon herself introduced House Bill 604, which would require any man who is 55 years of age or older to report to a local law enforcement company every time he “releases sperm from his testicles.” These pieces of legislation won’t get hearings; case in point, Cannon acknowledged they won’t move anywhere in the political process in Georgia. “But we did show for the initial time in that chamber that girls and people who have been impacted by men's decisions on their reproductive health – we have the correct as well to write any legislation that want and that we are going to be very intentional about it,” she says.


It’s also soon to tell who Cannon’s opponents will be in 2020 — qualifying for the next election hasn’t happened however — however she already notices something different about the campaign cycle: “The instances of voter suppression are continuing to rise and we are concerned that leading into the 2020 election, people will have more voter apathy,” she told MTV News.


Of particular note is the cautionary tale of Georgia’s last gubernatorial race: One month before election day in 2018, the Associated Press reported that over 53,000 voter registration applications, nearly 70 percent of these from Black applicants, were put on hold in then-Secretary of State Kemp’s office due to the state’s contentious “exact match” policy. Kemp won the election over Stacey Abrams; her voting rights nonprofit, Fair Fight Action, then joined forces with the domestic-worker corporation Care in Action to file a lawsuit about allegations of voter suppression. Their initial argument claims Kemp and the State Election Board, “grossly mismanaged an election that deprived Georgia citizens, and particularly citizens of color, of their fundamental right to vote.” Abrams also launched the Fair Fight 2020 campaign to make sure voter protections next year and beyond.


Sparking change by going to the voting booth or rallies is one side to the fight; just as crucial, Cannon mentioned, is supporting people from marginalized communities, and ensuring that they not only have access to their elected officials, although also feel heard by them.


“One of the initial steps towards culture change is listening to understand,” she mentioned. “And some of the people who I serve with, they don't understand me up until they listen to understand me. They don't understand the experiences of my trans employees members up until they really work with my trans employees members.”


Although that sort of work doesn’t come without a cost; for her part, Cannon had to safeguard her mental health to avoid burnout, and she is aware why other politically mobile young people may need to prioritize self-care at times, too.


“It takes courage to be vulnerable,” she mentioned. “As you walk through vulnerability, some days you are shamed by others. The political experiences that I have felt within the past four years have absolutely attempted to knock me down or to ask me to be silent.”


She has a routine to get through those experiences and says others others who desire to claim their stake in our political process need one, too: “If it means that some days you must turn off your phone, close out The world wide web and channel your ancestors, well go ahead and do it,” she continued. “If it means that you actually need to prepare concerted efforts to create changes to the community that you reside in so that there really is accessibility for yoga in libraries or that there really is actually a space for requesting peace, then we need to do that.”


Most of all, working toward her objectives in Georgia isn't a mission Cannon is pursuing alone. “Surrounding myself with people who are enthusiastic about the [same] things as I am” is central to the work of reminding herself that things will turn out OK, she explained. “And that way, I'll be alongside other people as they change and make our democracy better.”