Background: Unintended pregnancy is common within two years of childbirth, partly due to inadequate access to long-acting reversible contraception (LARC). Patient out-of-pocket costs for expensive LARC services may limit its use. LARC coverage has increased overall due to the Affordable Care Act but may not extend to postpartum women, given the unique structure of pregnancy ...Read more >

Despite its rarity as a reproductive choice, adoption plays an outsized role in the politics of abortion. The anti-abortion movement has consistently promoted adoption as its preferred solution to unwanted pregnancy, and adoption has been framed as an area of common ground in the abortion debate. This paradigm has consequences for how adoption is understood ...Read more >

Abortion is a leading cause of maternal mortality in Botswana, where legal abortion is restricted. Post-abortion care services are provided by government hospitals for complications following unsafe abortion. The health services are flooded with women presenting with diagnoses of spontaneous, threatened, or incomplete abortion, accounting for more than half of admissions to gynecology wards. Recent ...Read more >

Catholic hospitals care for one in six US patients and follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services, which prohibit abortion, contraception, sterilization, and certain treatment for obstetrical complications. Defenders of institutions’ rights to refuse this care argue that women can simply choose other providers. But, if women are not aware of the ...Read more >

In my early career, I examined the negative impact that institutional restrictions at faith-based hospitals have on obstetrics and gynecology residency training and the subsequent care graduates provide to women, including quantitative and qualitative studies of current trainees and recent graduates. Through the research and training activities proposed in this award, I will investigate solutions ...Read more >

The number of women seeking medication abortion and alternative methods of self-induction is increasing rapidly around the world, particularly in contexts where abortion is highly restricted or where abortion is legally available but inaccessible, such as South Africa. Despite these trends, there is a lack of understanding of women’s experiences with informal sector abortion; furthermore, ...Read more >

Background: The number of Bhutanese refugees in the US continues to grow with insufficient knowledge of current family planning practices of this community. Refugee women face additional barriers that prevent them from obtaining adequate healthcare. Methods: We analyzed the current attitudes and practices regarding pregnancy, contraception, social norms, and abortion in the Bhutanese community. A ...Read more >

For this Junior Investigator Career Development Grant, I completed a rigorous research and training program to develop my skills conducting abortion-related research. For my research project, I joined a team of collaborators at the University of California, San Francisco and in Nepal on two abortion research studies, one examining the experiences of Nepali women who ...Read more >

This study is a history of the development and subsequent resurgence of the occupational role of abortion counseling, a role that initially emerged in the early 1970s, before Roe v. Wade. This research is guided, in theoretical terms, by the approach to the study of occupations associated with the Chicago School of Sociology and in ...Read more >

In South Africa, abortion is legal for several indications up to 20 weeks gestation, and approximately 25%-30% of all abortions take place in the second trimester. Most public sector second trimester procedures are performed by medical induction with misoprostol alone, although in the Western Cape Province, a team of roving doctors provides dilation and evacuation. ...Read more >