Unintended pregnancy is a public health concern. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the US are unintended, with African American women experiencing the most unintended pregnancies. In Wisconsin, 65% of pregnancies resulting in live births to Black mothers are unintended, compared to 38% of pregnancies overall. Several state and federally funded preconception interventions have been ...Read more >

This research project seeks to understand the reproductive healthcare needs of undergraduate students, determine the role that student health services currently provides in access to information and resources, and examine how state narratives regarding reproductive healthcare influence campus services at two large public universities: The University of South Florida and the University of Kentucky. Over ...Read more >

Research on reproduction tends to focus on women. However, men can be quite influential to women’s reproductive decisions. Past research has found that young men perform a hybrid masculinity in which they can support women with contraception but still eschew responsibility for pregnancy prevention. The proposed research uses interviews with 40 American young low-income men ...Read more >

Elevated rates of teen pregnancy and parenting among youth in foster care (YFC) are well documented. Traditional prevention efforts for teen pregnancy utilize parents, schools, and community-based centers to intervene with youth directly or to support a system in which youth are nested. However, for YFC, intervening through these traditional systems is problematic, as they ...Read more >

Adolescent childbearing is a public health concern with significant consequences for teen parents and their children. As prior teen pregnancy prevention efforts have primarily focused on teen mothers with limited attention to teen fathers, gaps remain in understanding male pregnancy intentions, views of abortion, and influences on contraceptive use. Rigid norms about masculinity have been ...Read more >

Maternal fetal medicine (MFM) physicians work with multidisciplinary teams to diagnose, counsel, and treat women who present with fetal genetic disorders and congenital anomalies. Often, diagnosis occurs at the time of the 18-20 week anatomy ultrasound. If a woman chooses to terminate after having receiving a devastating prognosis, she often faces many barriers. As an ...Read more >

Objectives: To examine the use of abortion services and potential barriers to obtaining care among Asian and immigrant women in the US. Methods: Using vital statistics data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and population data from the American Community Survey, abortion rates and ratios will be calculated for Asian ...Read more >

Between 2011 and 2014, the number of US abortion-providing facilities declined by 3%, and as of 2014, 90% percent of all US counties lacked an abortion clinic. This lack of clinics increases the costs associated with obtaining abortion care, and the distance many women must travel in order to access abortion services. In 2011, a ...Read more >

Young women, those of lower socioeconomic status, women of color, as well as women living in Southern states continue to bear the highest burdens of unintended pregnancy in the US. Existing literature indicates that these same populations also have lower rates of contraceptive use, with lower rates often attributed to unequal access to family planning ...Read more >

Abortion has long been a contentious political issue in the US. While larger societal and political factors increasingly impede abortion access, the political rhetoric on abortion primarily focuses on the “right to choose” and therefore on individual women, as the primary, autonomous decision-makers for abortion. Rather than conceptualizing choice as an individual process, my project ...Read more >