Does access to high quality family planning positively affect the life course of women and their families? We plan to address this question – one which is crucial to policy arguments worldwide, but which has rarely been studied with adequate data on the life course outcomes of the women family planning programs are intended to ...Read more >

Objective: To compare two methods of delivering contraceptive counseling to pregnant women upon hospital admission for delivery in Colombia. Methods: This study is a multi-center randomized, controlled trial nested in a prospective cohort study which is studying long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) uptake after contraceptive counseling and immediate provision. Women admitted to either of two urban, ...Read more >

Objectives: Unintended pregnancy rates are highest among low-income women the US. Efforts to address this reproductive health issue include increasing access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC) because they are the most effective methods of pregnancy prevention outside of permanent sterilization. While state Medicaid policies have expanded access to immediate postpartum insertion of LARC in recent ...Read more >

Objectives: To determine the feasibility of including parents in contraceptive counseling and to assess whether adolescent-adult contraceptive counseling is acceptable and appealing to adolescents. Methods: Sexually experienced female patients ages 13-21 attending adolescent center visits at Boston Medical Center were approached for participation. Once consent was obtained, subjects identified a trusted adult with whom they ...Read more >

Effective contraceptive counseling is essential to providing women with high quality contraception that they can use correctly and consistently and thereby avoid unintended pregnancies, but what makes counseling effective is a growing area of research. One aspect of counseling that has received little attention is provider self-disclosure – defined as providers making statements regarding personal ...Read more >

Objectives: In 2011, I proposed to create a curriculum for adolescent medicine fellows to improve family planning and reproductive health service delivery and knowledge, and to enhance the reproductive health competence of future adolescent medicine physicians. At that time, and still today, there is no consistent curriculum for reproductive health or family planning training across ...Read more >

Objective: To evaluate whether having IUDs, contraceptive implants, and injections immediately available to women undergoing abortion compared to requiring an additional visit for these methods leads to fewer repeat pregnancies and repeat abortions in the following 12 months. Methods: We conducted a historical cohort study with de-identified data from the health records of women obtaining ...Read more >

Persistently high rates of unintended pregnancy in the US suggest a need for new patient-centered approaches to contraceptive acceptability and promotion. A critically understudied aspect of contraceptives are their sexual acceptability, or how methods influence women’s sexual experiences, which can in turn influence family planning clients’ preferences and practices. Moreover, despite professional enthusiasm about long-acting ...Read more >

Catholic health networks have expanded substantially in recent years. These facilities follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services, which prohibit abortion, contraception, sterilization, and certain treatment for obstetrical complications or miscarriage. Yet, little is known about patients’ awareness of religious restrictions on care. Defenders of institutionally-based conscience rights assert women can simply ...Read more >

The objective of this study was to explore the challenges that abortion providers in conservative or “red” states are experiencing in this period of intense regulation and restriction, and to document what have been their responses to these challenges. (“Providers” in this case refers to administrators and various levels of staff of independent clinics, and ...Read more >