Kenyatta Thomas: When I was a senior in high school, I had applied to join this group called the Mississippi Youth Council that was operated by this nonprofit called Teen Health Mississippi. And through that, I had started to reflect and learn a lot about the fact that Mississippi’s sex education policies are deeply ineffective and aren’t helping the way that they think they are. And in fact, are not helping at all, actually. And the ways in which it can be deeply sexist and racist, and all these other factors and how much they’re deeply harming communities. Shortly after I began working with them, I also started to volunteer with Planned Parenthood of Mississippi. I didn’t know that we even had a Planned Parenthood in Mississippi until I was a senior in high school. But I started to volunteer with them, and I was canvassing, and phone banking, and learning the deep history of abortion and all the different laws that affect the ability to access abortion in Mississippi. It started with, sex education that is based on abstinence is ineffective at reducing STI rates in young adults, and also doesn’t effectively teach young adults about how to handle relationships and make healthy choices about their sexual lives. Then it evolved into realizing that abstinence-based sex education tends to be more based in communities with more Black people and more people of color. White communities tend to get comprehensive sex education, and access to these resources. Then learning that abortion access, we have to fight for it a lot, especially communities of color and low-income communities have to fight for it. So when all these different experiences of lived people began to intersect at these issues to be bigger than they actually are, that’s when I began to study reproductive justice and it just became my mission in life because of all the different factors and issues that fall underneath it. It’s something that I feel like if we were to achieve it, the world would be a much better place. Having the choice is probably the correct language to be using. It’s not really an aspect of having the right if a person of color can’t, for example, in Mississippi, take time off work to be able to travel to the one abortion clinic that we have in the state. To have someone to watch children if they already have them, because most people getting abortions already have children. Having to pay for the abortion and all these different factors that are preventing them from being able to access this right. So it’s not about the right, it’s about having the choice and the ability to get one. I also think that for a lot of communities, especially communities of color, it could definitely be an issue of social ostracization because of teachings of religion or culture. And ultimately comes down to all these different factors that are trying to control the decisions that other people make over their bodies. They’re really hard to fight against. Gosh, I get so upset thinking about it, because it’s not fair that so many people don’t get to just make this choice about their lives because of all the different pressures, and factors, and barriers that they’re up against. Some that have been there for generations.