What We Do: Improve Access and Demand for
the Full Range of Contraception

All Access EKY (AAEKY) builds support for policies, programs, & services that ensure health equity and reproductive well-being for eastern Kentuckians by combining storytelling, youth empowerment, community outreach, and education. For over 7 years, AAEKY has served as a trusted partner in EKY, building the capacity of providers and community stakeholders to ensure that high-quality, comprehensive reproductive health services are accessible and that young Appalachians have the information, access, and opportunity to pursue the future that they envision for themselves. 

Our Priority Service area:

Bell, Breathitt, Clay, Floyd, Harlan, Knott, Lee, Leslie, Letcher, Martin, Owsley, Perry, Pike, & Wolfe counties

The Need:

In Appalachian Kentucky, female identifying individuals, especially youth, face formidable obstacles in ensuring their reproductive and sexual health. Information and access to options and care is limited. According to Power to Decide’s contraceptive desert data, there are only five clinics across AAEKY’s 14-county region that provide the full range of contraceptive methods. Nearly 25,000 women aged 13-44 are left in need of publicly funded contraceptive services and lack adequate access to care.

Furthermore, systemic barriers continue to impede same-day contraceptive provision; only 16% of clinics provide same-day IUD and implant insertion and only 8% have a provider available every day for these procedures. Public transportation in the region is nonexistent, creating further barriers to health services. This lack of access to the full range of reproductive health services is reinforced by increasingly restrictive state policies related to both health services and sex education, as well as a conservative religious, cultural, and social environment.

What we do:

  • Provider Trainings: Offer workshops and training opportunities to improve provider practices and patient satisfaction.

  • Free Birth Control: Plan B, condoms, and informational materials provided to individuals and organizations in EKY.

  • Evidence-Based Social Media: Produce accurate reproductive health related social media content, blog posts, and newsletters.

  • Youth Media: Over twenty short documentaries addressing issues of reproductive well-being from a youth perspective.

  • Advocacy: Offer training and network building to support policy solutions for increased contraceptive access.

“No Such Right: The End of Roe in appalachia”

With support from All Access EKY, interns in Appalshop’s 2022 Appalachian Media Institute focused their media reporting on the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision and produced “No Such Right.”

These young filmmakers describe the video documentary as “our search for answers, highlighting the voices of those impacted by Dobbs and their efforts to reckon with and remedy these issues. The story is a single piece of a much larger national narrative, but it is a story few others are in a place to tell.”

 

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