Hello everyone! My Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health Internship at NCI continues swimmingly. Just before Spring Break, I received the fantastic opportunity to present some of my work at Conceiving Equity, a mini-summit themed around reproductive justice and reproductive politics. For the first part of the evening, I participated in a poster session along with many other interns and student researchers. My poster displayed a portion of the literature review research concerning the rights of pregnant and parenting students under Title IX sex-discrimination legislation. For over an hour, I discussed some of the systematic barriers to fulfillment of Title IX rights with professors, peers, and Tulane community members. The highlights of the poster session included meeting Dr. Sally Kenney, the director of NCI, brainstorming ideas to help young parents at Tulane with Dr. Katherine Johnson, and inspiring a few classmates to apply for an NCI internship in the future. Not only did the presentations spark some great conversations, but it was incredibly encouraging to share some of my work and receive so much positive feedback. The event concluded with a fantastic presentation from J. Shoshanna Ehrlich, who explained the fascinating history of the “pro-woman” anti-abortion arguments. The summit was a huge success thanks to the planning efforts of Dr. Clare Daniel and the staff at NCI, and I truly hope that it becomes an annually recurring event.
This month, my internship research takes me to the review of various sources of state and federal funding for sex education programs. I am currently exploring the “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” that receive a significant portion of Louisiana’s federal dollars for teen pregnancy prevention as part of a larger project to identify what and how funds for sex education are spent in Louisiana. The search involves a lengthy catalog of nonprofit financial forms, phone interviews with grassroots organizations, and keeping up with new policy shifts in a constantly changing political climate. I am thrilled to have decided to stay in New Orleans this summer as an NCI Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health intern to continue working on this project with Dr. Daniel and the NCI team, so I look forward to where the next few months takes us!