Objectives: This study aimed to create a comprehensive description of the family planning needs and preferences of women who inject drugs (WWID) and are participants in the Community Health Outreach Workers (CHOW) Project’s Syringe Exchange Program (SEP) in Hawaii. Understanding these preferences will support the development of culturally sensitive and appropriate clinical practices for this ...Read more >

Objectives: Unintended pregnancy rates are highest among low-income women the US. Efforts to address this reproductive health issue include increasing access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC) because they are the most effective methods of pregnancy prevention outside of permanent sterilization. While state Medicaid policies have expanded access to immediate postpartum insertion of LARC in recent ...Read more >

Objectives: To determine the feasibility of including parents in contraceptive counseling and to assess whether adolescent-adult contraceptive counseling is acceptable and appealing to adolescents. Methods: Sexually experienced female patients ages 13-21 attending adolescent center visits at Boston Medical Center were approached for participation. Once consent was obtained, subjects identified a trusted adult with whom they ...Read more >

Effective contraceptive counseling is essential to providing women with high quality contraception that they can use correctly and consistently and thereby avoid unintended pregnancies, but what makes counseling effective is a growing area of research. One aspect of counseling that has received little attention is provider self-disclosure – defined as providers making statements regarding personal ...Read more >

Objectives: In 2011, I proposed to create a curriculum for adolescent medicine fellows to improve family planning and reproductive health service delivery and knowledge, and to enhance the reproductive health competence of future adolescent medicine physicians. At that time, and still today, there is no consistent curriculum for reproductive health or family planning training across ...Read more >

Objective: To evaluate whether having IUDs, contraceptive implants, and injections immediately available to women undergoing abortion compared to requiring an additional visit for these methods leads to fewer repeat pregnancies and repeat abortions in the following 12 months. Methods: We conducted a historical cohort study with de-identified data from the health records of women obtaining ...Read more >

Male partner resistance to family planning has been extensively cited as an obstacle to female contraceptive use in sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars emphasize that gender relations cause men to resist family planning and call for the incorporation of male gender norms into sexual and reproductive health programs, however a focus on exploring which specific norms of ...Read more >

Objectives: Since abortion laws were liberalized in Western Europe, conscientious objection (CO) to abortion has become increasingly contentious. The objectives of this study were to assess the efficacy and acceptability of national policies that attempt to enable both CO and access to legal abortion services. Do their regulations effectively permit CO while still ensuring that ...Read more >

Objectives: 1) to describe contraception counseling and bleeding complaints among women starting chemotherapy; 2) to estimate the satisfaction and bleeding patterns associated with a levonorgestrel containing intrauterine system (LNG-IUS) in women receiving chemotherapy. Methods: We performed a chart review of women 14-40 years old receiving chemotherapy from July 2008 to June 2013 at our institution. ...Read more >

Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, claims that abortion damages women’s mental health have been used to implement abortion regulations in the US. While studies demonstrating that abortion does not lead to negative mental health outcomes have important policy implications, they tend to control for the effects of income and exposure to violence, and in-depth ...Read more >