Background: Unintended pregnancy is common within two years of childbirth, partly due to inadequate access to long-acting reversible contraception (LARC). Patient out-of-pocket costs for expensive LARC services may limit its use. LARC coverage has increased overall due to the Affordable Care Act but may not extend to postpartum women, given the unique structure of pregnancy ...Read more >

Despite its rarity as a reproductive choice, adoption plays an outsized role in the politics of abortion. The anti-abortion movement has consistently promoted adoption as its preferred solution to unwanted pregnancy, and adoption has been framed as an area of common ground in the abortion debate. This paradigm has consequences for how adoption is understood ...Read more >

Abortion is a leading cause of maternal mortality in Botswana, where legal abortion is restricted. Post-abortion care services are provided by government hospitals for complications following unsafe abortion. The health services are flooded with women presenting with diagnoses of spontaneous, threatened, or incomplete abortion, accounting for more than half of admissions to gynecology wards. Recent ...Read more >

Catholic hospitals care for one in six US patients and follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services, which prohibit abortion, contraception, sterilization, and certain treatment for obstetrical complications. Defenders of institutions’ rights to refuse this care argue that women can simply choose other providers. But, if women are not aware of the ...Read more >

In my early career, I examined the negative impact that institutional restrictions at faith-based hospitals have on obstetrics and gynecology residency training and the subsequent care graduates provide to women, including quantitative and qualitative studies of current trainees and recent graduates. Through the research and training activities proposed in this award, I will investigate solutions ...Read more >

The number of women seeking medication abortion and alternative methods of self-induction is increasing rapidly around the world, particularly in contexts where abortion is highly restricted or where abortion is legally available but inaccessible, such as South Africa. Despite these trends, there is a lack of understanding of women’s experiences with informal sector abortion; furthermore, ...Read more >

Objectives: Define a set of developmental milestones to measure progress through the family planning fellowship and determine readiness for independent practice based on consensus from a majority of fellowship program directors. Methods: Three rounds of surveys were conducted using the Delphi method: Round one solicited both quantitative and qualitative responses concerning the number and content ...Read more >

Objectives: To compare pain control during cervical dilation between two paracervical block (PCB) techniques among women undergoing first trimester surgical abortion. Our research group established the benefit of a specific PCB technique: 20mL 1% buffered lidocaine (2mL at tenaculum site, 18mL paracervical at 4-sites), with a 3 minute wait prior to cervical dilation (PCB 20/4/3). ...Read more >

Background: Abortion stigma is a complex issue, and understanding its manifestation and perpetuation is challenging. However, abortion stigma may have profound social and health consequences for women and it is important for us to better understand it. When faced with unplanned or unhealthy pregnancies, fear of stigma may prevent women from seeking early safe abortions, ...Read more >

Objective: To determine whether manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) or electric vacuum aspiration (EVA) improves physicians’ ability to accurately identify products of conception (POC) in abortions at less than 6 weeks’ gestation. Methods: 498 pregnant women presenting for surgical abortion with mean gestational sac diameter of