Our advocacy work: Workshops
The objectives of the workshops include:
• To create a safe environment where participants can engage in discussion about sexual and reproductive health
• To provide participants with new knowledge, skills and resources to understand the concept of reproductive health and challenges to accessing reproductive and sexual health care
• To increase participants’ knowledge of sexual and reproductive health rights and responsibilities
• To encourage and support participants self-reflection processes as they critically engage with services around gender, culture, and community as it relates to sexual and reproductive health
• To support greater empathy and understanding among participants for their parent or child
• To identify and address participants’ key questions related to sexual and reproductive health care in Canada
• To provide supports to parents and youth to effectively communicate with each other about sexuality and reproductive health (dating, stds, sti’s, sexual consent)
• To increase participants’ awareness of community resources
• To enable participants to serve as (informal) resources within their families or communities
Sexual and reproductive health is an essential aspect of the overall health and well-being of an individual. It follows then, that the right to access sexual and reproductive health services and information is a basic human right.
Our workshop incorporates three complimentary strategies to reach the goal of reproductive justice: reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice. In addition, the workshops actively fights against reproductive oppression. Reproductive oppression is the control and exploitation of women, girls, and individuals through their bodies, sexuality, labor, and re-production. This regulation of women becomes a powerful strategic way to control their communities, and involves systems of oppression that are based on race, (dis)ability, class, gender, sexuality, age and immigration status.
We believe that thinking about reproductive justice is key to the struggle against reproductive oppression. Reproductive justice is the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, economic, and social well-being of women and girls, and will be achieved when women and girls 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. The core facets of a reproductive justice approach includes but is not limited to the fundamental right of every woman to:
-decide if and when she will have a baby and the conditions under which she will give birth
-decide if she will not have a baby and her options for preventing or ending a pregnancy
-parent the children she already has with the necessary social supports, in safe environments and healthy communities without the fear of violence.