Reproduction at the intersections: Exploring the impact of abortion bans on Black women’s infertility treatment experiences
Abortion
Awarded 2025
Emerging Scholars in Family Planning
Isabel Morgan, PhD, MSPH
Morehouse School of Medicine
$7,459

Dr. Isabel Morgan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Maternal Health Equity at Morehouse School of Medicine, and the Senior Advisor of Maternal Health at the Black Women’s Health Imperative. She obtained her PhD in Maternal and Child Health and Epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and MSPH in Population, Family, and Reproductive Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she examined inequities in access to postpartum care, contraception, and infertility treatment services. In alignment with Dr. Morgan’s research portfolio on racial inequities in Black maternal and reproductive health, this mixed-methods study leverages the Reproductive Justice framework and Black feminist epistemologies to examine how abortion bans, and fetal personhood laws impact fertility clinic protocols, reproductive medicine provider’s counseling approaches and Black women’s infertility service access and decision-making. This proposed research will demonstrate how infertility and abortion can be co-occurring reproductive health experiences and provide evidence of the specific impact of abortion bans on infertility service use. Ultimately, the learnings from this project will provide critical insights to inform facility level protocol and legislative strategies to optimize reproductive autonomy.