Five years ago, shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, Her Campus embarked on a project to uncover how people in college felt about their reproductive rights — a topic that had been brought to the national forefront, but a conversation students had been largely left out of. The result of our months of research, surveys, one-on-one interviews, and data analysis was 2017’s Our Bodies, Our Rules, a project that shed light on the many nuances of a deeply personal, yet also deeply public, topic.
Five years later, this issue is more urgent than ever. With Roe v. Wade overturned, abortion being outlawed on a state-by-state basis, and health care options seemingly disappearing overnight, the future of reproductive rights hangs in the balance. So again, we set out to discover and share how today’s college students feel about abortion, birth control, the law, and what’s ahead. Through a combination of hard data, actionable guides, and first-person perspectives, Her Campus brings you Our Bodies, Our Rights. This project explores how college students feel in 2022, how that’s changed in the past five years, and how it hasn’t. It’s important that Gen Zers’ voices be heard, all of whom do not think exactly the same. As you read and absorb, take some time to reflect on your own views, too. Our bodies and our rights are at stake.
Stephanie Kaplan Lewis
Her Campus Co-Founder, CEO & Editor-In-Chief
In September 2022, Her Campus surveyed 1,115 Gen Zers across the country, and the results reveal an evolution in college students’ outlook on reproductive health care and justice since our 2017 survey, Our Bodies, Our Rules. Gen Z is increasingly aware that abortion policy doesn’t only affect cisgender women. This generation is redefining birth control as a responsibility for both (or all) partners in a sexual relationship rather than just those who can get pregnant. Gen Zers are looking to their college campuses for adequate reproductive health care access, and to social media for resources and information.
With Our Bodies, Our Rights, Her Campus is amplifying the experiences and opinions of young people, such as one student’s journey to get an abortion before the six-week ban in Georgia. With this project, we’re also providing young people with the tools they need to protect and maintain their reproductive health, whether that’s expert-backed advice for talking to your partner about birth control or a guide to on-campus reproductive health care resources you might not have known existed. Now more than ever, Gen Zers deserve to be armed with the knowledge and tools to navigate the changing landscape of reproductive rights, and how it affects their privacy, their autonomy, and their well-being.
Erica Kam
Her Campus & Our Bodies, Our Rights Editor
Read the rest of the Her Campus Our Bodies, Our Rights project here.