Empirical depictions of state policy attitudes toward reproductive autonomy
Abortion and contraception
Awarded 2024
Emerging Scholars in Family Planning
Monika Nayak, BA
University of California, Los Angeles
$7,500

This study addresses a methodological weakness of studying population-wide interventions on outcomes of sexual reproductive health and well-being: inefficient consideration of the state policy environment. Current approaches to including the state policy environment in analyses are crude, incomplete, or irrelevant to family planning or reproductive health research. Policies do not act in a vacuum; they act as networks. Therefore, studying aggregations of cross-sector policies in each state could offer key insights into how new interventions interact with the existing policy landscape. Here, I am studying overarching state attitudes toward reproductive autonomy. I will first identify policy indicators from established legal epidemiology sources and shape a new database, transforming this conceptual construct into an empirical one. This project leverages existing policy databases which host a myriad of variables indicating enacted policies across U.S. states and Washington, D.C., by year. Through processes of re-coding and three methodological approaches for variable reduction, the policy database with novel measures for describing the empirical construct will take shape. Third, research assistants will be recruited to validate the coding structure and contents of the new database. Fourth, the database and associated findings will be disseminated through a public forum. Through the statistical consolidation of existing databases that report enacted policies—such as those that indicate state-level access to reproductive healthcare services, reproductive rights, and insurance coverage of family planning services—this project aims to advance the study of state policy environments and their applications to relevant research questions.