Dr. Kendra Harris is the current first year CFP fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. She completed her OBGYN residency at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN and earned her medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN. As a Black woman, Dr. Harris has experienced first-hand the dearth of Black abortion providers and mentors. In response, she has critically considered potential contributors to this lack of representation in her own training environments.

This personal training experience has inspired Dr. Harris’ proposed project to examine, through semi-structured qualitative interviews, the professional decision-making process of Black OBGYN residents as they consider abortion provision as part of their residency training, fellowship subspecialization and future OBGYN practice. To ensure a diversity of perspectives she aims to interview 30-40 Black residents, recruited to ensure participant diversity in gender identity, residency geography, and residency training curriculum as Ryan versus non-Ryan program status. Interviews will investigate themes of racial identity, familial upbringing, religion, spirituality, professional mentorship, and the US abortion narrative as contributors towards abortion provision and training decision making. We anticipate the findings: 1) will help the CFP community understand the contributors and barriers weighed by Black OBGYN residents considering abortion training and provision, 2) could be leveraged to steer the Ryan Program and CFP Fellowship environments towards greater cultural humility and support for Black residents, and 3) could inform the creation of networks and resources for Black OBGYNs providing abortion care in their future practice.