Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio aims to educate its community
Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region is here for all the region’s needs. The organization has been serving the Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky region for over 90 years—providing comprehensive sex education and routine/preventative health screenings for people. While abortion may be the service that first comes to mind when people think about Planned Parenthood, Maya McKenzie, media relations coordinator for the Southwest Ohio Region, says Planned Parenthood offers more to people than just abortion services, from education to preventative health care.
Sex Education
One of the programs offered by Planned Parenthood is sex education for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. These people are often overlooked, McKenzie says, but it’s important they’re learning vital concepts as neurotypical people, too—such as consent, STIs, pregnancy and how to navigate sexuality.
“There are misconceptions that just because a person is born with developmental or intellectual disability, they don’t have the capacity to be sexual, they don’t have the capacity to understand sexuality. They absolutely do. They’re human beings like the rest of us,” McKenzie says. “More than that, they have to navigate tricky conversations around relationships, around boundaries, around consent in a very different way.”
McKenzie says these sex education programs focus on giving folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities information so they’re equipped to advocate for themselves and understand these concepts in a way that works for them.
“It goes back to the conversation of autonomy, so they can feel like autonomous human beings. So that they can advocate for themselves; so that their loved ones can advocate for them. So that they know what things like condoms are; so that they know what [a sexually transmitted infection] is,” McKenzie says.
Fighting misinformation and myths is a big focus of Planned Parenthood’s sex education classes—the biggest being organization misconceptions.
“We have to battle people not knowing [sex education is] something we do,” McKenzie says. “I think that’s the first barrier is letting people know that’s a huge part of our mission, I would say.”
Planned Parenthood sex education classes educate young people and adults about their sexual health—ranging from consent, trauma, pregnancy, LGBTQ+ topics and birth control. These classes educate people on some of the most common misconceptions people may have.
“We hear a lot of misconceptions about how someone can get an STI. A lot of young folks are afraid of being pregnant in ways that are not anatomically possible to be pregnant but, of course, when you’re a nervous young person, any and all things are very scary and daunting in that way,” McKenzie says.
Routine and Preventative Testing and Care
Another facet of Planned Parenthood’s services includes routine and preventative testing and care—such as Pap Smears, breast exams, birth control and STI testing. McKenzie says it’s important for people to understand their “baselines” for themselves so they know when something isn’t normal and needs to be checked out.
“It’s just letting folks know what’s going on with themselves. It’s normalizing a lot of experiences people have so they feel safe enough to talk about things, so they feel safe enough to go to a provider and health care worker and share with them concerns they have.”
People who are curious about signing up for a sex education course or are in need of health care can visit Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region’s website and follow the prompts to find the information they need.
“You will find access to set up any type of appointment you might need. You can see the different range of services we offer,” McKenzie says. “We have a whole section of the website that breaks off into a few different areas about how people can learn with us. They can get involved with some of our camp programs, they can become a volunteer. And, as well, we have an entire virtual library online of virtual workshops that people can participate in if they don’t have access to our events or if they see it after the fact.”
Legal Rights
McKenzie says the organization also has been working on informing the public about their rights regarding abortion in the state.
“People that are anti-abortion are really successful in the way that they make overarching statements that maybe aren’t—in totality—true, but can pick up speed really fast,” she says. “It’s a lot of combating that and also working by the day [and] by the change in legislation to get updated information.”
Recently, at press time, a Hamilton County judge granted a temporary restraining order against Ohio’s six-week abortion ban. This allows Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio to resume providing abortion services.
Increasing Access
McKenzie says Planned Parenthood wants a world in which everyone has access to reproductive health care.
“A lot of the work we do is supporting patients in crisis or demystifying and soothing fears. I think if we could get to a point where people have the autonomy to understand what’s going on with their bodies—to take all the preventative measures that they can and have access to those measures—is kind of how we get to a more equitable place in Ohio and in southwest Ohio specifically,” McKenzie says. “That’s kind of the basis of the work we do and before we can get to things, like reproductive health care, people have to know what it is.”
Planned Parenthood, McKenzie says, operates intersectionality—providing education and care to folks from all walks of life. Whether people are struggling financially or have less access to health care, McKenzie says Planned Parenthood is available to them.
“At the heart of what we’re doing, all of it comes together to really offer support to our community in the way of giving them access to their own health, to their own body and to their own story,” McKenzie says. “I think that’s something that can’t be quantified by putting it in one branch of, ‘It’s a service. It’s a program.’
“It’s more than that. It’s a human right to their own body, to their own health … I think that’s what really keeps us motivated, especially in tough times …, is the heart of that mission, which is autonomy to folks and access because we believe that it’s a right and not a privilege.”
