“Reflecting on My Time in the Reproductive Rights & Reproductive Justice Internship Program”
by Emma Allen
This semester marks my last semester participating in the Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice Internship Program. I joined this program the summer after my sophomore year (2021), as a Research Assistant for the New Orleans Maternal & Child Health Coalition under Dr. Clare Daniel. As I look forward to graduation, I reflect on the amazing experiences I’ve had in this program and the work the NOLA MCH Coalition does.
I started my Research Assistant position when the Coalition was embarking on an evaluative research project, examining the efficacy of the coalition, its past performance, and how to improve the coalition in the future. When the project was just starting, my job was to prepare and organize all the documents, presentations, agendas, and to help make sure all the groundwork was laid before interviews could start. Then I transcribed the twelve interviews and when the paper was written, I completed citations.
Throughout my time, other projects included working with the reference management software, Zoterro. In Zoterro, I work with scholarly articles and sources for research projects. I organized them, made sure they have a citation, and found new sources to add to Zoterro. From there, another large project was to create a presentation that will serve as a general introduction to the Maternal & Child Health coalition. The presentation will be used to introduce the coalition to potential new partners or members and serve as a broad overview of who the coalition is and the work they do. The past two semesters, I’ve worked on projects related to the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, including researching TRAP laws, creating annotated bibliographies, and researching university responses to the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
This program has taught me so much about reproductive justice, abortion rights, and the organizations in New Orleans. I am immensely grateful for my time in this program and the opportunity to contribute to the reproductive justice space in New Orleans.
My second largest project was putting together a presentation that will serve as a general introduction to the Maternal & Child Health coalition. The presentation will be used to introduce the coalition to potential new partners or members and serve as a broad overview of who the coalition is and the work they do.