The Affordable Care Act and access to family planning and abortion in California’s Central Valley: A community-based participatory research study
Abortion, Contraception
Awarded 2015
Community-Based Participatory Research Grants
Anu Gomez, PhD
University of California, Berkeley
$150,000

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) represents an extraordinary expansion of healthcare access, barriers to achieving reproductive health equity persist. This project seeks to investigate how insurer practices can limit and delay access to abortion and family planning care among Latinas in California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region lacking access to abortion providers and inundated by health and social disparities. Researchers from California Latinas for Reproductive Justice and the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley will partner to conduct timely and policy relevant research using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach. Through a photovoice project and community survey in two sites in the Central Valley, we aim to engage and empower community members as co-researchers, build capacity, and translate research into policy advocacy to promote health equity and reproductive justice. We will disseminate the results locally and at the state level in order to highlight the barriers that Latinas in the Central Valley face in accessing family planning and abortion care and develop policy responses. As an unprecedented number of California Latinos have enrolled in health plans since the ACA’s implementation, it is imperative to understand how insurance practices are impacting Latinas’ access to key sexual and reproductive healthcare services.