In four years as a peer educator for the group Sexperts at UCLA, Sriha Srinivasan talked to a lot of student groups about sex education.
Some were more difficult than others. Fraternities and sororities were the toughest.
Because of the Greek system’s reputation for ignoring consent in sexual relations, “they expected us to come in and basically scrutinize them or scold them,” said Srinivasan, who is now an abortion doula with the Los Angeles Abortion Support Collective and enrolled in medical school.
She remembers the work it took to loosen students up and help them let their guards down.
“I would start off and say, ‘Hi, my name is Sriha and I'm a part of Greek life too, I'm in ADPi,’ you would see [them react], ‘OK, she's part of this, she's not going to judge us for being a part of this and she understands where we're coming from.’”
That, in a nutshell, is peer health education: training students as ambassadors to convey sometimes controversial health topics. They create spaces where students feel open to listening, dialogue, and discussion.
A state law that took effect in 2023 also offers a new opportunity to universities’ student health ambassadors: informing their peers across public university campuses that students are now entitled to medication abortion services.
An LAist investigation published in January found that in the year since the abortion pill requirement went into effect, a patchwork approach of outreach and promotion has developed among UC and CSU campuses. Some campuses put a lot of information online about medication abortion while other campuses put out none. Some students — it’s unclear how many — don’t know their campuses now provide abortion pills.
In the absence of consistent messaging over the past year, students have said they feel a need to step in to inform other students about their rights.
Staff on some of these campuses see an opportunity to create awareness campaigns for abortion pills, using the peer education model.
Medication abortion uses a combination of two federally approved drugs to end a pregnancy. It does not require a surgical procedure.
The first pill is mifepristone, which blocks a hormone known as progesterone that the body needs for a pregnancy to continue. The second drug, misoprostol, is taken 24 to 48 hours later. It causes cramping and bleeding and empties the uterus.
Since the Food and Drug Administration first approved medication abortion in 2000, its use in the United States has grown quickly. Medication abortion is highly effective and in 2021 was used in more than half of abortions in the U.S. The FDA has approved the two-drug regimen for pregnancies up to 10 weeks.
“Students have had to sort of go out of their way to access an abortion that they could have access to right here on campus,” said Shira Brown, director of Cal State Northridge’s Women’s Research and Resource Center. “For me that feels like a major gap in knowledge-sharing.”
After reading the LAist report, Brown said she did her own research, which confirmed a knowledge-sharing gap on her campus. She also talked to leaders of the university student health center. All that led her to decide to organize an awareness campaign this year focused on medication abortion.
Here’s what she plans to do:
The awareness campaign for medication abortion needs to stand on its own, she said, because couching it with other reproductive health topics and context may dilute the message, which she hopes to keep simple.
“This is a service that’s available and it’s legal and you should know about it,” she said.
Eight students, most of them unpaid, help run CSUN’s Women’s Research and Resource Center. Three of them will work on this campaign, she said, because as peers they know best all that students are juggling these days while earning a degree.
Altogether, 33 public university campuses in California are affected by the medication abortion requirement, and each campus is left to its own devices about how to implement it.
However, some system leaders think there’s room for more involvement.
“We are looking at template language for campuses to include on [individual school websites],” said Ray Murillo, the Cal State University system’s assistant vice chancellor of student affairs.
In-person outreach efforts will likely still be developed by the individual campuses.
Cal Poly Pomona’s student health center organized for the first time this month a female reproductive health topic workshop called “Taboo Topics: Womxn’s Health Workshop.”
“It was awesome,” said Kenya Luse, senior coordinator for health promotion and wellness services at the student health center at Cal Poly Pomona. The workshop took place in a conference room in the university student center. About a dozen people attended.
“Students were able to share their feelings around menstruation, their feelings around birth control, how culturally those things have been for them,” Luse said.
The success, she said, was due in part to the work of a handful of peer health educators during the workshop, students trained by the center who communicated the topics and facilitated discussion using their own student experiences to do that.
“As a student and also a student worker, I’m like a middle channel to bridge the gap between the student and the professional,” said Minh Tam Vo, a Cal Poly Pomona senior majoring in chemical engineering who was one of the student educators in the workshop.
“They feel more comfortable talking to me and asking me questions,” Vo said.
Did the peer educators make a difference?
“I felt more connected,” said Celina Robles as she walked out of the workshop. She’s a Cal Poly Pomona urban planning and design major. She knows one of the peer educators and came to support her. She also learned a few things about the menstruation cycle. It was a safe space for learning, she said.
“When you see people similar [to your] age and other women as well, it just feels like a more tight-knit community,” she said.
It’s not a secret to campus administrators that peer health educators are a powerful tool.
“They can reach their peers so much better than I ever could,” said Susan Flaming Yeats, director of the student health center at CSU Dominguez Hills. "They are the best people to speak to their friends and their classmates about these sensitive topics, better than anybody on staff and faculty ever could.”
Campus administrators say it’s urgent to include information about medication abortion as one more resource to help students graduate.
“It's about reproductive justice and reproductive rights,” CSU Northridge’s Shira Brown said, “but it's also just about making sure our students graduate, which is ultimately what every single center, organization, department on this campus, what our end goal is, right?”
