“Understanding the Sexual and Reproductive Justice Resources at Tulane”
by Hannah Petillo
A major task for my internship in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program this semester was reviewing the resources on Tulane’s campus for sexual and reproductive healthcare. As a student leader for the Queer Student Alliance, I liked to believe that I had a pretty good idea of what our campus looked like in terms of resources, but I was continually surprised as I found more and more diverse resources. Work being done by the Well for Health Promotion, Students United for Reproductive Justice, and the Tulane Health Center left me with plenty to catalog. At the beginning of the semester, we planned a large project including starting up resource libraries to bring together all of these diverse resources and increase knowledge on campus so that students could better educate themselves, but what we found out after talking with leaders at the Well for Health Promotion was that there was no lack of information out there, there was more so a lack of visibility for them and a lack interest from large parts of the student body. We could create all sorts of educational zines and flyers but often that would just be reinventing the work done by others before us and would likely get us no further than them.
My supervisor and I had to decide on a new direction for our project, and we were at a great point to start pivoting because of the review we had done. We decided to start small and implement some changes to help those students who were interested in reproductive justice become their own advocates and leaders. We are planning on starting off with a single bookshelf, located just outside my supervisor’s office, stocked with resources made for students by students. Empowering students to take control of their own reproductive health is a step in the right direction, and hopefully, it will be the first step of many more in this project.