The Mabel Wadsworth Center and the Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps
Summer 2019
The summer before my senior year, I was selected to be a Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps Intern (RRASCI). Run though Hampshire College’s Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP) program, RRASCIs are competitively selected for a funded internship placement at organizations doing intersectional reproductive rights work across the country. RRASCIs also get funded attendance at the CLPP conference about building the movement for reproductive freedom, at which we underwent training and connected with current and past RRASCIs.
I was placed at the Mabel Wadsworth Center, an independent, feminist reproductive and sexual healthcare center in Bangor, Maine. I interned full time for 10 weeks over the summer, gaining experience with Mabel’s advocacy, education, and clinical work. I developed materials and helped plan events for Bangor Pride, and I got to go to the state capital in Augusta to promote the organization. I wrote blog posts for their website about queer pride for the month of June and menstruation for the month of July. At the end of my internship, I worked with Health Equity Alliance, another queer- and economic justice-focused nonprofit, to design and facilitate a workshop about healthy queer and trans relationships.
Some of my favorite time at Mabel’s was getting to observe in clinic. As a small organization, my supervisor worked with me to customize my internship to my own interests, and as a result I was able to spend time in clinic almost every week. Mabel’s approach to full-spectrum, feminist reproductive healthcare cemented my conviction that nursing was the right path for me. My time in clinic included HRT consultations, abortion care, pre- and post-natal visits, general wellness exams, and contraceptive counseling. This experience as a RRASCI at Mabel’s showed me how practitioners can make justice-informed decisions when providing care, profoundly changing patients’ relationships to medical institutions. When I came home from my first day in clinic shadowing one of their Women’s Health Nurse Practitioners, I knew that was the role for me.
The Developmental Progress Clinic at Emory University
September 2018-May 2019
Throughout my junior year, I was able to intern at the Developmental Progress Clinic (DPC), an interdisciplinary clinic of Emory School of Medicine located at Children’s Hospital of Atlanta (CHOA) Hughes Spading. The goal of this clinic is to support the development of children up to age 5 who spent significant time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at birth. I most directly worked under a medical doctor of neonatology and developmental psychologist, but the clinic also includes physical therapy and social work. This internship constituted my Psychology minor capstone.
I worked significantly on the Behavioral Support Project (BSP), an initiative the DPC clinicians developed to address the problem of patients not being able to access specialist behavioral services that they were referred to. I contributed to a Quality Improvement (QI) project on this topic. I contributed to maintaining the data needed for the project and wrote up the results in my final paper for the course. Using my interdisciplinary background in WGSS and Psychology, I was able to bring an analysis of the socioeconomic factors, as well as medical ones, that might inhibit access to special care. I also presented this research at Agnes Scott’s annual research conference, which can be seen below.
The second semester, I observed clinic weekly. My observation focused on psychological evaluation, but I also frequently followed physical therapy and medical evaluations. Although it’s unusual for a clinic to be so interdisciplinary, I often sat in on clinicians’ discussions of the day’s work. My time in the clinic greatly clarified my future in healthcare, and I particularly enjoyed seeing how the interdisciplinary nature of their work played out in patient health outcomes.
The final presentation summarizing the main research project I was involved with, which I gave at Agnes Scott’s Spring Annual Research Conference (SpARC) (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
