Over the past decade, our team has worked with families to develop interventions to improve how parents communicate with adolescents about sexual health issues. In recent years, parents have increasingly asked that content be delivered online. Parents report that as families’ schedules have become busier, it is difficult to attend in-person programs. Parents want a ...Read more >

Religious hospitals control a growing share of healthcare in the US. In Catholic hospitals, clinicians must follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services, which restrict provision of contraception, abortion, sterilization, and fertility treatment. Reproductive health policies in other (non-Catholic) religious hospitals are less well understood. In Chicago, two of the three largest ...Read more >

Objectives: To develop and pilot test a mobile phone game intervention to decrease high risk sexual behavior (e.g. vaginal intercourse without condoms, multiple sexual partners, intercourse under the influence of drugs) in a group of 15-17 year-old Black and Latino adolescents. Methods: Iterative mixed methods design to create and develop a game prototype in waves ...Read more >

Background: Concerns have been raised about the consequences of enthusiastic promotion of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) for women’s reproductive autonomy, particularly among underserved or vulnerable groups including postpartum women. We developed the Birth Control After Pregnancy decision aid as a strategy for upholding patient-centered decision-making about postpartum contraception and, in particular, supporting access to postpartum ...Read more >

Population-based registries are essential public health information systems that provide data to support improvements in patient care and clinical decision-making. There are significant gaps in the data around contraceptive safety and efficacy for women with complex medical conditions. As medical advances in the US allow women with complex medical conditions to live through their reproductive ...Read more >

New research suggests that sexual minority women (SMW) have an increased risk of unintended pregnancy compared to their heterosexual peers. While scholars have documented some of the pathways leading to teen pregnancy disparities for adolescent SMW, few studies have examined adult SMW’s elevated risk of unintended pregnancy, despite distinct differences between adolescent and adult developmental ...Read more >

Adolescents in El Salvador lack comprehensive reproductive and sexual health (RSH) education, a basic health right. The curriculum presently used in schools is limited and inexact, and only 5.5% of teachers have been trained in it. Comprehensive RSH education optimizes the health and development of young adults. In 2012, a progressive Salvadoran government acknowledged and ...Read more >

We conducted a needs assessment with 31 women experiencing homelessness, 81% of whom also reported illicit substance use, in San Francisco from December 2017 – March 2018, and found that a majority of participants would be happy if they found out they were pregnant today. Among women surveyed at a street encampment, one-third used no ...Read more >

Over the last several decades, public health researchers and practitioners have partnered to improve population health by combating stigma around multiple health issues through mass media interventions. Examples include harm reduction campaigns to combat stigma around substance use disorder, HIV, and mental health service utilization. However, to date, no large- scale domestic mass media campaign ...Read more >

In today’s media environment, the internet is often the first source the public turns to for information and perspectives on abortion. This information, found in multimedia formats, is shared by a variety of sources and accessed through diverse platforms. Despite the obvious importance of the web as an information source, evaluating the presence of abortion ...Read more >