WGST 373: Reproductive Injustice was such an awesome and challenging honors course. I had never taken a WGST class at any level before, so I went into this course a little nervous of what to expect. However, this course pushed me to challenge my own ideologies and become more aware of issues existing in our society. Throughout this course, we explored the “reproductive justice” framework. This framework, developed by women of color and indigenous women in the 1990s, combines the concepts of “reproductive rights” and “social justice.” It expands the traditional “reproductive rights” concept which mostly focused on abortion and birth control and was too narrow to fully address the needs of marginalized groups, particularly of women of color, indigenous, and transgender individuals. This class challenged me to use a variety of disciplinary lenses such as socio-cultural, gender and sexuality, economic, political and legal, scientific and medical, in order to explore reproductive justice topics like sterilization abuse, population control, domestic violence, incarceration, childcare, poverty, welfare rights, and infant and maternal mortality. The biggest and most important assignment of this course was the podcast at the end of the year. We were able to explore, research, and become an expert on a topic relating to reproductive injustice in our community. We prepared all semester by deepening our understanding of injustices, reproductive rights, and ways to discuss controversial information in a professional way. Below is a link to the podcast I created with a fellow honors student that discusses crisis pregnancy centers.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rHUa-izTesxxIMmySr5Pfv3xZvWtXaS5/view?usp=sharing

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