Subasri (Suba) Narasimhan completed her PhD in Community Health Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health where she was a Bixby Doctoral Fellow, Child and Family Health Trainee, and a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institutes of Child Health and Development Pre-Doctoral Trainee. Her MPH in Maternal and Child Health ...Read more >

Alexandra Calderon is a second year medical student at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. As a Spanish-speaking, first-generation Latina immigrant, Alexandra looks forward to becoming a clinician able to provide comprehensive health care, including reproductive health services, to underserved families. Alexandra completed her BA in English Literature at the California State University, ...Read more >

Medical assistants (MAs) have been largely overlooked in research on abortion providers. The proposed research narrows that gap by documenting the integral role MAs play in abortion care. MAs are a rapidly growing occupational group in healthcare and often come to abortion work without a prior ideological commitment to reproductive rights. Using ethnographic methods, I ...Read more >

Despite its critical importance in reproductive health, access to safe abortion care in the US and globally continues to be impaired by laws and policies based on religious, political, or other ideologies. Although there is substantial anecdotal evidence about specific beliefs and rationales for opposing abortion provision, identifying specific attitudes, and exploring how those attitudes ...Read more >

Young transgender men (including young people who are transmasculinizing) face disparities in the provision of reproductive health care including contraception, despite their biologic capacity for pregnancy and evidence that this population has a need and desire for these critical services. There is a paucity of evidence describing the contraceptive preferences of transmasculine patients, with almost ...Read more >

Black women in the US are more likely to experience unintended and short-interval pregnancies, which are associated with increased risk of adverse birth outcomes for mothers and infants. Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), including the placement of intrauterine devices (IUDs) or implants, is the most effective contraceptive method for reducing unintended and short-interval pregnancies; however, Black ...Read more >

Motivation for contraceptive use hinges on the user’s assumption that they are fertile—capable of conceiving or impregnating. The idea of infertility carries anxiety and stigma for many and, with no way to validate fertility other than attempting pregnancy, may cause people to doubt their reproductive capacity and need for contraception even though they have no ...Read more >

Unintended pregnancy is a public health concern. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the US are unintended, with African American women experiencing the most unintended pregnancies. In Wisconsin, 65% of pregnancies resulting in live births to Black mothers are unintended, compared to 38% of pregnancies overall. Several state and federally funded preconception interventions have been ...Read more >

This research project seeks to understand the reproductive healthcare needs of undergraduate students, determine the role that student health services currently provides in access to information and resources, and examine how state narratives regarding reproductive healthcare influence campus services at two large public universities: The University of South Florida and the University of Kentucky. Over ...Read more >

Research on reproduction tends to focus on women. However, men can be quite influential to women’s reproductive decisions. Past research has found that young men perform a hybrid masculinity in which they can support women with contraception but still eschew responsibility for pregnancy prevention. The proposed research uses interviews with 40 American young low-income men ...Read more >