.png){kind=small}
2018 Applied Social Issues Grant Recipient
Knowledge is Power is Reproductive Justice: Advocating for Comprehensive
Sex Education in Knox County, Tennessee
Renee Mikorski
Reproductive justice can be defined as the ability for people of all genders to have access to accurate and empowering information about their bodies in order to make informed decisions about their health and sexuality. Although abortion and contraceptive access often get centered as being most important in the reproductive justice movement, access to accurate and non-biased information about sex and sexuality are also important (Pillard, 2007). Unfortunately, this access is not equitable for young people across the United States.
Comprehensive sex education has become a passion of mine since moving to Knoxville, TN from New Jersey in 2014. I quickly learned that Tennessee is an abstinence-only state. This means that abstinence is taught in all sex education curricula and students do not have access to accurate information regarding birth control, STI prevention, or any other information that could be useful in regards to their own sexual health. I believe that all students have the right to this information so they can make informed decisions about their own bodies. Therefore, I became very passionate about making changes to this law in any way I could so that students could get the information they needed and deserved.
This passion lead me to work with Planned Parenthood in developing my current project entitled “Knowledge of and Attitudes towards Comprehensive Sex Education in East Tennessee”. Although Planned Parenthood in Knoxville has provided information and resources to young people in the Knoxville community about comprehensive sex education, it is still important to advocate for change in policy at both the local and state level.
As of now, there is no data from East Tennessee to support a change in legislation around the issue of comprehensive sex education. Therefore, a large part of my project involves collecting data from community members in Knoxville and its surrounding counties about individuals’ knowledge of and attitudes towards comprehensive sex education in public schools. This data gathered will then be used to advocate for changes in policy at the local and state levels here in Tennessee. In addition, this information will be presented back to the community to disseminate the knowledge, promote awareness, and allow a reflexive process of data collection.
Overall, the hope for this project is that people in East Tennessee will have their voices heard when it comes to the issue of comprehensive sex education. The law should reflect the needs and wants of the people it is affecting, including students, teachers, and parents in the community. Hopefully policy moves in a direction that is helpful (rather than harmful) to Tennessee’s young people. As stated above, I believe that young people should have access to non-biased information about sexual health so that they can make informed decisions about their own bodies and health. I hope that using this data to advocate for change will be one step in that journey towards access to comprehensive sex education in the state of Tennessee.