Dr. Odum is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. Dr. Odum is studying the barrier of patient-physician mistrust in the reproductive lives of African American women seeking abortion care and contraceptive services. Significant gaps in the literature continue to exist related to understanding the barriers that African American women ...Read more >

Reproductive health behaviors and outcomes are the product of complex decision-making processes with multiple levels of influence. While a considerable body of literature examines the proximate and ecological influences, few studies have examined the role of social norms and stigmas. Researchers generally agree that social norms specify how individuals should behave in specific situations, and ...Read more >

Objectives: We sought to compare the decision-making process between women with Medicaid and private insurance undergoing postpartum sterilization. To prevent involuntary sterilizations, regulations require that Medicaid-insured women wait 30 days between signing a consent form and undergoing this surgery. This waiting period has been associated with unfulfilled requests for postpartum sterilization procedures, and in turn, ...Read more >

Objectives: Recent research from Texas found that self-provided and non-clinical abortions are on the rise, largely due to abortion restrictions. Anecdotal evidence from other abortion advocates suggests that some people seek alternative abortion methods for other reasons. This is the first qualitative study with a geographically diverse North American sample to describe people’s preferences, motivations, ...Read more >

This primary historical research project examines the concept of “unintended pregnancy” in social and cultural context, seeking to explain how such an intimate concept as pregnancy planning became one of the major goals of late 20th and early 21st century US public health. Though women have actively planned and prevented pregnancy since at least the ...Read more >

The mentorship of medical students is vital to the future of family planning research, advocacy and training the next generation of abortion providers. Most previous publications have focused on a clinical family planning curriculum for medical students in their third and fourth years of medical school. In this mid-career mentorship project, I will focus on ...Read more >

The training and research activities proposed in this Junior Investigator Career Development Award will expand my research program in reproductive health for incarcerated women and set the stage for future grants. I will survey a representative sample of prison and jail systems across the US to prospectively report the aggregate number of pregnant women, abortions, ...Read more >

I seek a Midcareer Mentoring Award to achieve my long-term career objectives: (1) reduce unintended pregnancy through interventions that enhance safe contraceptive health care delivery and improve access for disparate populations and (2) foster a cadre of research-scientists working to enhance family planning services in primary care settings. Since 2006, I have mentored 37 trainees. ...Read more >

Objectives: To assess late presentation for care, gestational age, and disparities in traveling for care in Mexico City’s public abortion program, called ILE. To replicate a recent publication (Koch et al) purporting to show that restrictive abortion laws are associated with reduced maternal mortality in Mexico. Methods: We extracted data from clinical charts and used ...Read more >

The recommended treatment for ongoing pregnancy following medical abortion is usually suction curettage. Limited published data demonstrate that additional misoprostol can successfully terminate ongoing pregnancy, but there is no published literature on the repeat use of a combined mifepristone-misoprostol regimen. This randomized placebo-controlled trial seeks to assess the effectiveness of a repeat course of 200 ...Read more >