Protecting reproductive justice in the misinformation era: A framework for developing clinical interventions to mitigate misleading contraceptive social media content
Contraception
Awarded 2026
Emerging Scholars in Family Planning
Alexa Beacham, MPhil
City University of New York
$7,500

The attack on access to safe, reliable, and effective contraception and abortion care threatens reproductive justice. Access to information about contraceptives, like the IUD, is undermined by the spread of misleading information on social media apps such as TikTok. Repeated misleading content can deter people from making value-aligned family planning choices. While many people view health information on TikTok, the app is not designed to accurately or systematically distribute high-quality health information: social media serves people videos based off of popularity rather than clinical relevancy or accuracy, making it a flawed source of information that decenters people’s needs, values, and priorities in their reproductive healthcare. The proposed study leverages misinformation science and the reproductive justice framework to develop intervention scripts that clinicians could use in shared decision-making to mitigate misleading content about the IUD. This would enable patients to autonomously consider which contraceptive options are the most fitting and appropriate for them. In an experimental study we will test the impact of misleading IUD content on acceptability of the IUD, and if this effect can be mitigated with a clinical video intervention. The goal of the intervention is to promote agentic contraceptive decision-making in the face of misleading content. We hope that this can be useful to clinicians as they engage in patient-centered shared decision-making about contraceptives.