This year marks the 50th anniversary of the conception of Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS), a book that transformed the landscape in which young people came of age. Yet in discussing the text and its meaning for us as public health professionals, we discovered that only half of the 2019 AJPH Student Think Tank was acquainted with the book, and we sought to learn why.

Although earlier generations were given OBOS as a rite of passage, only one AJPH Student Think Tank member was introduced to the text by a loved one. The remaining two learned about OBOS from professors who presented it as a historical document in undergraduate and graduate coursework. We were taught that the book emerged in an era of harsh obscenity laws and recognized it as a response to widespread incompetence and fatal ignorance regarding women’s health. In speaking with older colleagues, we came to understand what this publication meant in its early years.

As millennials (spanning our early 20s to late 30s), we grew up in a different context. In the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, state governments began to mandate AIDS education (notably, the federal government countered by incentivizing abstinence-only education in 1996). Nearly all of us remember receiving biology-centric lessons in secondary school on sex, sexually transmitted infections, and pregnancy prevention, although the exact nature of the content varied by geography. Yet even the most progressive classes left much to be desired—including any thorough discussion of pleasure, consent, LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual or allied) identities, and the social context in which sex occurs.

For those of us who came of age in the Internet’s infancy, this meant learning through experimentation and word of mouth. Younger AJPH Student Think Tank members spoke of discovery through reality TV shows (e.g., 16 and Pregnant) and social media, particularly YouTube. Today, such interactive platforms have assumed OBOS’s educational mantle. As one AJPH Student Think Tank member put it, the Internet allows “a living conversation that continues to evolve every single day.” However, access to the Internet came with caveats. It can be hard to discern what is useful and true. Increased access to pornography introduced members of our generation to inaccurate or limited depictions of human bodies and sexuality, which later had to be unlearned.

In returning to the actual text of OBOS, we were struck by the explicit political analysis of sexual and reproductive health topics. Each edition further identified oppressive structures like racism, capitalism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and the patriarchal paradigm. This information was absent from our sexual education curricula but resonates today as campuses across the country talk actively about enthusiastic consent, sexual violence, LGBTQIA health, and the reproductive oppression of Black communities, Indigenous communities, and other communities of color.

We see the exclusion of such topics as a failure of the education we received. As members of the most diverse generation in US history, we needed a way to situate sexual and reproductive health information in the context of our entire lives. The reproductive justice¹ framework—developed by women of color and grounded in human rights and intersectionality—helps us to understand how systems of oppression shape access to information and services, as well as experiences of care. The framework has become particularly salient to our understanding of the links between different struggles for reproductive freedom. It also empowers us to build alliances and collective power that transcend silos and strengthen public health. Ultimately, our consensus is that although the spirit and ideas of OBOS continue to reverberate, the reproductive justice framework orients today’s action toward a more inclusive future. By harnessing civic power, we will continue to further the core message of OBOS.

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