"Reproductive Justice is when all people have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about their bodies, sexuality, and reproduction for themselves, their families, and their communities in all areas of their lives."--URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity(formally Choice USA)

 This summer, Micha and I have been participating in the Sex and Politics in the Capital City Summer Intern Series, which is an eight week lunch series sponsored by Advocates for Youth, CHANGE, Choice USA, and the National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC). The program is dedicated to educating DC area summer interns in issues relating to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice through weekly informational sessions. In July, participants have the opportunity to participate in the Summer 2014 Advocacy Day where they can speak with members of congress about these issues and address policy concerns.

This week's session, presented by Planned Parenthood, focused on current issues in Sex Education at the grade school level. The presentation covered pertinent statistics regarding sex education across the country, key definitions relating to reproductive justice, and highlighted the lack of a national standard for comprehensive sex education.

One of the key messages from this session was that comprehensive sexual education is not the opposite of abstinence-only curricula. Rather, this format takes into consideration that almost 50 percent of adolescents have had sex and equips this population with the tools necessary to be safe and healthy. The curriculum is designed to celebrate the diversity of adolescent populations while abstinence-only programming is tailored to a much smaller cohort. I think it is important to remember that comprehensive sex education includes the discussion about abstinence in addition to contraception, condom use, STIs, and HIV prevention.

I attended this event, and plan to attend more events in the series, as I am interested in the intersection between healthcare and social issues. In the past, I have worked on addressing disparities in education; however, I had not considered the rampant inequality in sex education specifically. I learned more about how I could become an advocate for reproductive justice and met other interns with similar interests.

Sydney Butler is currently pursuing a B.A. in Human Evolutionary Biology with a foreign language citation in Spanish at Harvard University.