In 2011, the 82nd Texas Legislature enacted four key pieces of legislation restricting access to family planning: the state budget for contraceptive and reproductive health screening provision was cut by two-thirds; a tiered funding system directing funds away from the clinics providing the majority of services was set up; the Women’s Health Program Medicaid waiver ...Read more >

Objectives: Understanding how women are influenced by interpersonal communication about contraception can inform interventions that improve contraceptive use. The aim of our research was to develop the methods and tools needed to conduct a longitudinal cohort study of social networks’ influence on contraceptive use. Methods: We developed survey instruments for the longitudinal cohort study in ...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 >

The Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics include abortion education as a core objective for medical students. Medical schools often use brief clinical exposure to abortion to meet this objective. For many students, this encounter serves as their only opportunity to observe this common but potentially controversial procedure. No study has asked students to ...Read more >

Objectives: The idea of third-trimester abortion has been used politically, both to cultivate support for and opposition to abortion rights but the experiences of people who obtain such abortions is missing from public discourse. This study aimed to: 1) increase knowledge of women’s experience of seeking and obtaining third-trimester abortion and 2) document relevant clinical ...Read more >

In recognition of the barriers to optimal reproductive and sexual health for women affected by HIV, The AIDS Foundation of Chicago (AFC) recently launched the Midwest HIV Prevention and Pregnancy Planning Initiative which aims to reduce HIV infections and increase pregnancy planning among women in high HIV prevalence communities in the Midwest by increasing the ...Read more >

This Community-Based Participatory Research Grantsproject aims to expand access to reproductive health services, particularly for adolescents and young adults, in an underserved, primarily Native Hawaiian, rural community in Hawai‘i. Partners include the University of Hawai‘i Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women’s Health, the Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center, and Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest ...Read more >

Objectives: Misoprostol-alone is an increasingly common method of induced abortion in countries such as Pakistan where abortion is legally restricted, but measurement poses significant challenges. The list experiment is a secret-answer technique that has been shown to more accurately measure sensitive behaviors like abortion compared to traditional face-to-face interviews. This study developed measures of misoprostol ...Read more >

Objective: To compare the effectiveness of two oral analgesic regimens in first trimester medical abortion. Methods: We randomly assigned 250 women undergoing first trimester abortion with mifepristone and misoprostol at three clinics to two ibuprofen regimens: therapeutic (800 mg every 4-6 hours as needed for pain), or prophylactic (800 mg starting 1 hour before the ...Read more >

Background: Women undergoing abortion are at high risk of poor contraceptive use and future unintended pregnancy. We sought to to investigate whether an informational phone call three weeks after having an abortion would improve contraceptive use six weeks after the procedure. Methods: This was a single-blinded, randomized controlled trial in women who chose a combined ...Read more >