Wesley Knight  0:00  
This is a KU NV studios original program. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 jazz and more the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Tanya Flanagan  0:19  
Good morning, and thank you for joining me for the scoop with Tanya Flanagan, I'm so happy you decided to wake up and start your day with me here on the scoop, where we talk about life, joy, funny moments, trending topics and so much more. We promise to keep you in the know and find out what you know. So let's get started. You tongue,

Tanya Flanagan  0:47  
good morning and welcome to another edition of the scoop with me. Tonya Flanagan, and welcome to 2026 I am just excited and delighted to be here with you for this first Sunday in the new year. It is amazing to realize that 2025, is gone. We've said our goodbyes, and we're gearing up to embark on a new 12 month journey write new chapters to each of our lives. So I'm wishing you all the best as we start this new year, and welcoming to the studio with me this morning. Dr Tony bond, who is a tremendous and amazing woman who has lived, lived, I say lived, when I say live, lived, had a great life. Because sometimes we don't do all that we can, and we look back. And every so often you meet someone that makes you go, wow. And Dr, bond, you were one of those people who made me go, wow. Remember the first time I met you was in Carson City during the legislative session last year, and you were there visiting and doing your activist advocate thing. And I thought she's really interesting. And then I had the pleasure of running into you in a store on the west end of town down here in Summerlin. And I said, Don't I know you? And we sat there and figured out how we knew each other. And I am pleased to say that as 2025 expired, we began to work on a friendship. And I said, Please come and sit with me in the studio and have a conversation. Please come and be my first conversation of the new year. So thank you for electing to do that.

Toni Bond  2:27  
Thank you for inviting me. I am delighted to be here Good morning and welcome Good morning.

Tanya Flanagan  2:34  
And you probably ask, Why am I so mesmerized by Dr bond? And I am so because she is one of 12 women who gave birth to the concept of the reproductive justice movement in 1994 to talk about black women's health, black women's maternal health, and just various aspects of health care. And as you know, I'm a huge health care advocate, and I just think that is so important. And today, as we see what women are going through, what black women are going through, there was a time in life. Well, I admit, Dr Bunn, I thought you were young. You got pregnant. You had a baby. Easy peasy. Babies were everywhere. People got married. It seemed to be the thing that you just did naturally. And as you get older and you realize how important it is to have a healthy child, it's not that simple. It's not that easy peasy, and you begin to hear the stories of how women are marginalized in the in the doctor's office, and you recognize how crucial it is to have someone listen to you, what was your take on this and what brought you to this space?

Toni Bond  3:45  
Oh, my goodness. I think I'd have to go back to when I was 1112, years old, and when I was coming up. I grew up during a time where, if we think talking about the body and human sexuality is taboo now. It was even more taboo in the 70s, when I was 11 and 12, and my mom did not talk to me about my body. She did not talk to me about my menstrual cycle, and it wasn't because she didn't want to, I think it was because she didn't know how to, because no one talked to her about it. Her mom didn't talk to her, and so she didn't know what to say to me. And we all grow up, we make mistakes. And so I got into this work because I didn't want another young black girl to live the same kind of life I did.

Tanya Flanagan  4:47  
I can completely relate to that. I think even my comment, where I said what I said, you saw people. They seemed to get married, they grew up, they had a baby. You were young, and your body just produced. It was just. What your body was going to do, right? And then you have this child, and you're young enough, as we say, your girlish figure returns, or you snatch back, as people like to say, and as if you've never had the child. But it was this simple thing, and then you saw large families. So women had 11 and 12 and 13 children generations before our generation, and so it seemed as if having a child was a simple thing to do. You just did it. But I think what you're saying is so true, and it speaks volumes to the ignorance that we have in that space, because it wasn't that simple. We just didn't know any better, and the conversations were taboo, and no one was talking to us. And we are different. Black women are different. Women are different Absolutely, from one race to another.

Toni Bond  5:47  
It wasn't that easy. And the women like my grandmother and perhaps women in your family who had large, large numbers of children, it wasn't that easy, you have to know that there were some, probably maternal health problems in there. There were some miscarriages. My grandmother had six children that lived. But I also found out a few months ago from from a relative that my grandmother had, actually, she had one set of twins that lived, but she had two additional sets of twins that did not live, and then there were some other miscarriages in there. And so part of, I think what you're touching on is that, particularly in the black community, amongst black women, we need to have these conversations

Tanya Flanagan  6:42  
we do, folks, I'm talking to Dr Tony bond this morning here on 91.5 Kumbh jazz and more, as we get started into the new year of 2026 and this may sound to you all like a heavy conversation, but we're getting the year off to a tremendous start. But I also like to qualify why I have folks in the studio and Dr bond is a professor of ethics at Methodist theology school in Ohio. She also has a number of other accolades to her credit. She has spoken to bodies of people internationally, in South Africa, in Johannesburg in Durban. She has spoken on a number of different subject matters and studied done fellowships all over the world and all over the country. And so I invited her to come and talk about an area of expertise, one of them, really all of them, whatever you want to share with us this morning, but I just want you to know her breadth of work is extensive, and we're talking about black maternal health for a bit this morning, statistically, I don't have those numbers, and I remember looking at them some time ago, the disproportionate effect that healthcare does disadvantages in healthcare cause for black women versus other people of color?

Toni Bond  8:06  
So we're and you said this earlier, that the lived experiences of black women are different. Black women and girls are different, and we have to trace that back to the reproductive and sexual injustices that we have experienced in this country since the enslavement how our bodies have never been our own. We've been denied that embodied experience, because the reality is that the relationship between black women and girls in the US has always been one of power, surveillance and control. And so it's been very difficult for us to have not just an embodied experience of our bodies, but to have control over our bodies. And so when we present for health care, for health care services, there's always these assumptions that are made about not only us, but what we know about our bodies, and assumptions about our lived experiences, sometimes assumptions about why we are at the doctor trying to obtain care, and the assumption that it's something we have done to cause The need for us to need health care, even with maternal health, black women are oftentimes denied care for pain management. There's this, this, this myth that we can sustain inordinate amounts of pain, and so we still have to deal with those, with those myths. I'm also a trained doula, and my first doula client, I'll never forget, she just had this wonderful experience delivering her first child, and her husband was in the delivering room, and we had just undergone. In this just magical moment where I was guiding her through the labor and delivery process. And for me, I had just witnessed my first birth too. And so she's lying there with her child on her chest, and the nurse comes and says, okay, Mom, this is a good time to think about a contraception method to prevent any additional unintended pregnancies. Would you like to get the shot now the Depo Provera shot. And so my client said, No, I'm not interested. And so the nurse went off and did something. She came back 10 minutes later, so Mom, this is a good time to think about contraception to prevent any other unintended pregnancies. And I just stopped and looked at her and I said, ma'am. She said, No, that's the first thing. The second thing is that you have made an assumption that this pregnancy was unintended. Her husband is sitting over there in the corner. You need to not make those assumptions, and you need to stop asking her if she wants to get the Depo Provera shot. She said, No, that's enough. Go away. But that's so disrespectful. It is disrespectful. But again, that that

Tanya Flanagan  11:20  
it's mind boggling to think that, but it is so true. You know, people write so you look at a person and you write their story, you don't take the time to find out who this person is, what's happening in this person's life. There was a report on the news the other day, on one of the on CBS mornings talking about medical space and empathy, and teaching doctors empathy and to be to dial in to the time and the space for patient care. And that is a perfect example of where people don't I remember going through breast cancer, and going in to talk about if I did the route of a mastectomy and needed the reconstruction, wanting to know what to expect, and the doctor being very dismissive about what would happen and what I could expect, and just basically treating me like I'm going To do what I'm going to do, I understand what I do. You don't need to worry about how it's going to feel or what it will look like, or how it will impact your life. And I remember telling him, You don't need to worry about seeing me again because you're fired before we get started. Let's not What about in your work teaching women to have that power, that voice to say, here's what I need, or here's what I don't need, here's what I want. Because reproductive justice and good health is tied to having a voice

Toni Bond  12:52  
absolutely and understanding that we are our own best advocate, and also that information is power. So a good portion of my activist work has been to help educate black women about our bodies, to understand our menstrual cycle, to understand what it means when we ovulate. You'd be surprised how many black women don't know the first day of the menstrual cycle. If you know that, you can plan the calendar, determine your pregnancies. You can understand what's happening to to the various things that happen to your body during the menstrual cycle. So information truly is power when it comes to black women and in our lived experiences. And I have noticed throughout the years of doing this work the difference that it has made. I've had women come up to me and say, you know, Tony, that information you gave me about understanding my menstrual cycle. I've never had another unintended pregnancy, and I can attest to that I didn't understand my menstrual cycle until I was 30 years old, and I went to this just amazing Women's Health Center when I lived in Chicago at the age of 30, and the healthcare worker asked me if I understood my menstrual cycle. And I said, No. She said, Do you know the first day of your menstrual cycle? I said, Listen, I know that my period shows up, and when it does, it's most times inconvenient. And she sat down and explained to me the menstrual cycle and did something I'd never experienced before. She showed me how to look at my cervix. I had never seen my cervix. I said, you could do that. And she said, Absolutely. And she showed me how to do it for myself. Now, first of all, we have to say the whole setup of this exam. There were mittens on the stirrups. She warmed the spec. Feeling it was just it. There was in scenes and soft music. This was the best Ghani exam I'd ever had in my entire life.

Tanya Flanagan  15:10  
Has anyone ever compared? Folks weren't expecting this at the beginning of 2026

Toni Bond  15:17  
Why are you? But there was something just not just it's like I had my aha moment that

Tanya Flanagan  15:25  
I really felt respected, I felt respect. And you felt you felt cared for.

Toni Bond  15:30  
I felt respected, cared for, for and there was this sense of liberation that I felt like, wow, this, this is my body. I can control it, and I am the expert of my own body, because

Tanya Flanagan  15:46  
it is a very exposing experience. Whenever you go to see the doctor, especially the gynecologist, and you walk in there, and they don't make it comfortable either. And it's, it cannot be. You know, the office might be pretty. It might be decorated nicely, or at least nicely enough, but there comes a point where whether you're doing your gynecological visit, you're doing your breast exam, I don't care really what you're going in for. Offices can feel cold, and in this particular case, because I remember going through my reconstructive surgery, and one of my wounds wouldn't heal, and it was from a skin graft on the growing area, and the plastic surgeon kept having to look, and I was like, he has to look at this one more time, because that's Not even his real job. Can I scream. And finally, through some prayer and faith, the wound healed. And he said, Do you want me to look at it? And I said, I do not. I am good, because it was such a as much as I trusted him, and him being a medical expert and having seen everything, I mean, literally, he remade me to some point, it still was awkward to have to have that area part of a part of this process. Absolutely, and there's something about being a woman and needing to feel comfortable, and everything that women go through as we change being comfortable to have a conversation, Senator Rochelle Winn ran a bill in the legislative session last year to have a Dave to recognize menopause. The bill didn't pass, thank God, but, but she ran a bill, but to me, the credit to her was to sit before a committee and present a bill on this issue and talk about the dynamics of how it affects women.

Toni Bond  17:47  
Listen here, can we talk about menopause? Do we want to talk about menopause? I think we need to talk more about menopause, just like

Tanya Flanagan  17:55  
everything else that we've talked about today, where you talk about the importance of talking about what women

Toni Bond  17:59  
are going through. Well, just being healthy, just as my mother didn't tell me about the menstrual cycle, nobody told me about menopause. Like the whole surprise, it is a surprise, crazy it nobody told me. I mean, I knew hot flashes, but I had no understanding of what a hot flash really meant. Someone asked me, What does a hot flash feel like? I said, well, it feels like there is this little man inside your stomach, and there are two furnaces down there too. And whenever he feels like it, he runs to one of those furnaces and he slowly turns the knob up. And so it feels like your body is on fire from the inside out, starting at the pit of your stomach all the way up to the top of your head. That's what it feels like, and it's just wrong. Is that a good description?

Tanya Flanagan  18:51  
It's good. I didn't ever feel like it was the pit of your stomach, like this is right at your neck and your head's just inflamed. But maybe because I'm a black woman, I'm always worried about what my hair is doing, so that's why I think he's right here, because I don't care about anything else except what's going to happen to my hair. Well, they

Toni Bond  19:14  
don't tell you about hot flashes. They don't tell you about menopausal belly.

Tanya Flanagan  19:18  
That is like such a trend right now, honestly, I have to say, on every social media platform, you see all these advertisements for women managing belly fat through menopause.

Toni Bond  19:32  
Well, not just belly fat real, but back fat too. Back and back fat is really wrong.

Tanya Flanagan  19:38  
That's a sin, right? No, no. Not every but to that point, not everyone gets in so, so, I mean, honestly, folks, some of it also probably is DNA, because some people were just whatever they say. If you look at your mom, what your mom looks like when she gets older, if you have your mother's body or and a lot of times, girls get a shape. Can be similar to their mom or their mother's side of the family, but dad may have something to do with it as

Toni Bond  20:06  
well. My mom didn't have back fat,

Tanya Flanagan  20:09  
so that your DNA, huh? Well, some people just, you know, it was an aunt to the auntie. You know, it can skip. Can be like, you know, maybe because I think my niece, child has her mother's side, but she doesn't have her dad's side because her dad's thin, but her mother's side is more full figured voluptuous women, my dad was thin, so it just depends. But, you know, anybody fat, it's just criminal, right? No, it's not. We just don't want what we don't want when we don't want it

Toni Bond  20:40  
well, you know, the interesting thing is, weight or body size has always been an issue in this country, and particularly with women, that the norm held up for us is that you have to be real thin and black women we are not in have not we're not designed to be, typically, rail thin, typically, typically, and this idea that we we are starving ourselves To be, to to, to conform to this prescribed idea of what beauty looks like.

Tanya Flanagan  21:24  
I think people should just be healthy. Activeness is good. Good. Mental space is important. Exercise to be good for you to feel good, to manage other health concerns that may serve surface like diabetes or high blood pressure. And two, forget joint health and good mobility. As you get older, every you know, we start new year's resolutions, and one of them is almost always, I want to be healthier. And then people start off, whether they're walking or they take out the gym membership. Gym club is always, always crowded the first two weeks. Then, you know, that trails off. Because I say, find what you can do and be realistic about it and take it in small chunks, like if the goal was 20 pounds, my new thing is five pounds, five pounds, five pounds, five pounds, because I can see the end of the first five, because it doesn't feel daunting like 25 or whatever, that high number is, sure, and then, because, as women get older, you lose you know muscle and muscle was so important, and bone health so not so much, whether or not you're trying to be modeled, then I'm not advocating for that Ever. I'm advocating for be happy with who you are and know what that good place is for you and strive to be the best you that you can be. At a trainer once who told me, everyone can be Beyonce, you can only be your own, your own personal version. And I was like, Thank you, trainer, hmm,

Toni Bond  22:58  
well, I think we, yeah, we all have to come up with a health regimen that feels good for us, conforms to our lifestyle, because we have, I mean, we have different lifestyles and different levels of activity and different kinds of responsibilities. I'm going to tell

Tanya Flanagan  23:16  
you now. I'm going to have to have you come back to the show, because I want to talk about what you teach, and we don't have enough time to do all of that theology and ethics. You have a PhD in theology and ethics. You teach. I do.

Toni Bond  23:30  
I am. I'm that nerdy girl who, first of all, I'm very concerned with what we ought to do and ought not to do. And I'm that nerdy girl who enjoys reading Aristotle and Kant and Plato and Socrates.

Tanya Flanagan  23:44  
In an age where people seem to do whatever they want to do, like that, will have to really, I really want you to come back and talk about what we ought to do and ought not to do, in an age where people seem to do whatever they want to do, regardless of what people think, how it affects people around them. We are in a, I don't want to say a, me, me, me, because I think the state of America, in many ways, is calling people to action, to be concerned about one another for different reasons, or it will challenge folks to be concerned. But I definitely want to talk to you about what we ought to do and what we ought not to do, because that's heavy, because

Toni Bond  24:25  
there's a different day and age. There's a difference between what you ought to do and what you should do. What's the teaser on that? So what you should do is, well, I should do that, but no, I'm not gonna do that. I don't want to do that. Okay? What you ought to do is much more. There's a finality with it, right? There's a much greater level of responsibility you ought to do that. You ought to be concerned about your neighbor. You ought to love your brother, your sister, you. Ought to be concerned that there are so many people who are unhoused. You ought to be concerned that everyone has access to food, access to health care, right? These are things we ought to be concerned about. And so there's less, you know, room for. Well, maybe I should be concerned with that, but I don't really want to be. No, you ought to be,

Tanya Flanagan  25:22  
because you ought to be as your consciousness, right,

Toni Bond  25:24  
absolutely ought to be as your conscience.

Tanya Flanagan  25:28  
And my should is my free will.

Toni Bond  25:31  
Well, you have free will with your conscience. Your should is, is more like, I guess you could say your free will, but your should is more like you have the option to not do the right thing.

Tanya Flanagan  25:52  
I was thinking as you were speaking, is that where choice lives, not in the same sense of free will, but

Toni Bond  25:58  
okay, so choice, we have the choice to

Tanya Flanagan  26:02  
act responsibly, concerned, choice to engage around the good it is for someone else, other than myself, or maybe myself. Yes, my choice

Toni Bond  26:16  
yes and, and there's a and there is a difference between the good and the right, because sometimes what's right may not be good for everybody, and what's good may not be right.

Tanya Flanagan  26:29  
That's quite the conundrum that reminds me of when I was going through something and we're getting into the very end. That's why I already know you need to come back and talk to me some more. But something happened between me and a really, really close friend and a life coach friend said to me, why do you think she should have done that for you? Why do you think she owes you that? And it was the aha moment, and I was 45 when I realized people don't have to make a choice that's good for you. They may make a choice that's good for them absolutely, and it doesn't mean they intended to hurt you, but they, in some way, chose themselves. And I recognized how much I don't choose me, and it made me re evaluate decisions in my own life, not to be mean or hurtful to anyone, but to recognize that I, too, have the right to sometimes choose what might be better for me, absolutely.

Toni Bond  27:28  
And ethics is about understanding that every day, at any given moment, we are confronted with moral dilemmas, and we have to make We're always having to make a decision about a moral dilemma, and how do we do that?

Tanya Flanagan  27:44  
That's quite a circumstance to give consideration to. And you're right, and I think that that's a lot of where, of what we've gotten away from, for where the state of the country is now, well, and when we talk moral factor is, and we're and we're getting to the end. So will you come back and talk with me some

Toni Bond  28:03  
more? Absolutely, I love talking about ethics.

Tanya Flanagan  28:07  
I enjoy talking to you. So folks, if you have not figured out just who she is, how she thinks what she's experienced. Dr Tony, bond here with me this morning is why I found her just her energy, your energy. Found you so interesting and wanted to get to know you better. I'm going to have her back. We're going to continue this conversation. I'm thinking of doing some new things in 2026 and having some some women round table discussions that happen on a regular basis. And I would love for you to be a part of that. I'd love to come back for that. Thank you for tuning in to the scoop with me. Tanya Flanagan here on 91.5 KU NV, jazz and more, I believe our time is up. It has been great to spend time with you this first Sunday and 2026 to the year ahead, to the week ahead to the day ahead. We'll take it in small chunks and we will succeed. I will talk to you next time you want to thank you for tuning in to the scoop with me. Tonya Flanagan, and I want to invite you to get social with me. I'm on Facebook and Twitter. My name is my handle, T, a n, y, A F, l, a n, a G, A N. You can also find me on Instagram at Tonya almonds Flanagan, and if you have a thought, an opinion or a suggestion, don't hesitate to shoot me an email to tonya.flanagan@unlv.edu Thanks again for joining in stay safe and have a great week. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai