By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Kim Greene and Jon Fleischaker
When the National Council of Jewish Women, Louisville Section hosts its third annual Advocacy in Action — Jewish Voice for Choice Breakfast May 14 at The Temple, it will honor a key advocate on behalf of what NCJW describes as “the Jewish community’s efforts to regain reproductive rights and healthcare justice throughout Kentucky” — attorney Kim Greene. She is being honored with the 2025 Sonia & Dr. Ronald Levine Jewish Voice for Choice Award.
Achieving those goals has taken perseverance, persistence and perhaps most of all, patience.
“With all the things that are happening in our country now, it’s hard to talk about how we stay sane and stay in the fight, because everybody’s exhausted,” Greene acknowledges.
“There were a few years when it felt to me that the country was trending in the right direction,” she says, “and I allowed myself to optimistically believe that within my lifetime, in most places we were going to have full access to reproductive rights.”
That optimism was tested severely on June 24, 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court — in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — ruled that the Constitution does not grant an inherent right to abortion. That landmark ruling overturned the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, and in the three years since Dobbs, the landscape has been decidedly fraught — both nationally and in Kentucky.
A Planned Parenthood Louisville board member since 1983 who has tracked many a restrictive bill coming out of Frankfort, Greene knows as well as anyone about the challenges facing women when it comes to pregnancy.
“In 1970, Kentucky had 17 health centers across the state that provided abortion care,” she wrote in a Courier Journal op-ed published on March 30, 2022 — barely two months before the Dobbs decision. “Now, there are just two abortion providers left in the state, and both are in Louisville.”
Three years later, that number is down to one: the city’s EMW Women’s Surgical Center. Greene’s vision of “full access to reproductive rights” — if not shattered — was substantially dimmed.
“When I realized that was giddily optimistic, I did get very depressed,” she admits, “until I remembered how many people in the history of our country have fought for things they never saw come to fruition.”
Greene — along with her husband, attorney Jon Fleischaker — has long been associated with First Amendment cases and causes. Yet as NCJW recognizes, her commitment to women’s rights is no less passionate.
“When I nominated her, I didn’t say anything other than for 40 years, she has lived Ron and Sonia Levine’s life’s work to secure reproductive justice for the people of Kentucky,” says Jane Goldstein, an NCJW, Louisville board member who first proposed Greene last year.”
Established in 2023, the Voice for Choice Award “is presented to an outstanding person or people who have demonstrated courage of action and/or have made a significant contribution in the efforts of reproductive rights and healthcare justice in the commonwealth of Kentucky,” NCJW Louisville’s website says, “guided by the Jewish values of tikkun olam, repairing the world, and kavod ha’briyot, respect for human dignity.”
The inaugural award was given to Sarah Baron, Jessica Kalb and Lisa Sobel — plaintiffs who argued that Kentucky’s exceptionally restrictive laws regarding abortion conflicted with their religious beliefs. Last year’s award honored Dr. Ernest Marshall, a former owner of EMW Women’s Surgical Center; and Carol Savkovich, who was vice chair of the Kentucky Religious Coalition for Reproductive Freedom.
Sonia Levine, who through Goldstein declined to be interviewed for this story, has chaired NCJW’s Legislative Committee and Women’s Issues Committees. She also spent six years as the Kentucky State Public Affairs Chair. Ronald Levine was a 30-plus-year OBGYN physician who served as Louisville Planned Parenthood’s medical director. He died in October 2023 at age 94.
The award’s purview is deliberately broad, explains Sarah Harlan, NCJW Louisville’s Executive Director. “It could include direct care; it could be advocacy, speaking up when others can’t, recruiting, or contributing ideas to the movement” — demonstrating “perseverance in the midst of resistance.”
Dobbs, for example. “It was a very bad decision,” Greene says. “I think it’s not premised on reality.”
Elsewhere, Greene often finds herself in the role of explainer. “A lot of people — as soon as they hear the name ‘Planned Parenthood’ — immediately think, ‘abortion.’ That’s all they think about, when Planned Parenthood does so much more.” Contraception, for instance, plus “annual exams and Pap smears, breast exams, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infections. We do HIV screenings and treatment. So, it’s not just pregnancy.”
The organization — which here carries the geographically far-flung designation Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky — “participates in Title X family planning,” Greene says. “Those are Federal dollars,” part of a program “created during a Republican administration (Nixon, in 1970), by the way” — approximately $5 million, which under the Trump administration are currently frozen.
“Funds flow to the state, who is the primary grantor here, and then the primary grantor has sub-grantees. We were the major sub-grantee in Kentucky.”
Many recipients are covered by Medicaid, the Federal health insurance program for low-income Americans, itself under threat. Losing Medicaid reimbursements could substantially diminish Planned Parenthood’s ability to deliver services.
Born in 1949 and growing up in Ashland, Ky., Greene graduated from Duke University with a degree in Education and soon found herself in New York City with her then-husband, teaching immigrant children at a public school in Spanish Harlem. Laid off in 1974, she moved back home and eventually earned a law degree from the University of Kentucky.
In 1980 she joined Louisville’s most prestigious law firm — Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, where she met Fleischaker. They were married in 1988, and in 1997 jumped to the Cincinnati-based firm of Dinsmore & Shohl, establishing its Louisville office.
She retired in 2004, exchanging the practice of law for what had become — and still is — her abiding passion: Dream Tending, which she describes as “an interactive and embodied method of approaching our dreams.”
“I see private clients, conduct workshops and retreats, and make presentations to groups and organizations about the value of attention to our dreams.”
It’s a fascination Greene has carried with her for decades, put on simmer while she forged a legal career and her advocacy on behalf of reproductive freedom.
“You know how things circle around in life?” she says. “There are things you’re interested in at one point, you lose that interest for awhile, and then it awakens in you again. That’s what happened with me.”