Blog Series: SiX Repro’s ICYMI Research Roundup (April Edition)

SiX Repro’s ICYMI Research Roundup is a new regular update and short summary of recent sexual and reproductive health fact sheets, toolkits, and journal articles.  We bring you these latest and most relevant insights in the reproductive health, rights, and justice landscape to support state legislators in advancing evidence-based policymaking. These updates cover a wide range of reproductive health, rights, and justice topics, from abortion to contraception to maternal health to assisted reproductive technology and from the intersections of climate change or disability justice or gender affirming care and beyond. We value engagement from our state legislator community and invite you to join us as we explore these latest developments.

Blog Posts 

• New cuts to the nation’s family planning program will worsen access to contraceptive care in Wisconsin (Collaborative for Reproductive Equity (CORE), April 2025): Title X provides critical family planning services and other preventive care to people living with low incomes and those who are un- or under-insured.  CORE outlines the evidence of how the Trump administration’s recent targeted cuts to Title X, if upheld by the courts, along with across-the-board funding reductions, will dramatically weaken the family planning safety net nationally and in Wisconsin.

• Celebrating one year of OTC birth control pills in the United States! (Medium, March 2025):  In this blog post, Ibis Reproductive Health celebrates and reflects on one year of the anniversary of the first-ever over-the-counter (OTC) daily birth control pill — Opill. This groundbreaking advancement in contraceptive access came after two decades of advocacy, research, and movement building from Free the Pill coalition members and supporters.

Commentary 

• The Government Should Give Moms Money, But Not Only After Childbirth (The Century Foundation, April 2025): Elizabeth Dawes, Director of Maternal and Reproductive Health and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, examines the structural reasons behind falling birth rates and highlights how guaranteed income programs are showing positive results. She argues that the real solution is to make life more affordable for families through structural policy reforms.

Executive Summary 

• Best Practices for Medicaid Coverage of Doula Care (Doula Medicaid Project & National Health Law Program, April 2025): This publication by The National Health Law Program’s Doula Medicaid Project collects the key takeaways, strategies, guiding principles, innovations, and other recommendations from all of the work that has been taking place across the country since the start of the Doula Medicaid Project in 2018.

Fact Sheets

• Abortion Bans Are Driving Away Young and Educated Workers (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, April 2025): Institute for Women’s Policy Research’s (IWPR) recent survey of 10,000 adults found that 1 in 10 have moved or know someone who has moved due to abortion restrictions in their state. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, 15% say they have relocated or know someone who has. These quick figures from IWPR show that abortion restrictions are not just limiting reproductive health care access, they are driving people away.

• All abortion bans harm patients (UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, April 2025): This new fact sheet from researchers at UCSF’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health provides up to date evidence showing that any limits on abortion care harms patients.  The evidence shows that people need abortion care throughout pregnancy, pregnancy is too complicated to legislate, abortion care later in pregnancy is safe, limits on abortion later in pregnancy opens the door to criminalizing patients, and people have better outcomes when they get the abortion care they need as soon as they need it.

Research Briefs 

• Collision of Crises: The Triple Threat to Reproductive and Maternal Health Care (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, April 2025): This brief is the first in the Birthing While Black: The Urgent Fight for Maternal Health Reform Series by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), which will examine different dimensions of the Black maternal health crisis.  This second brief focuses on the dangerous collision of policies that target and criminalize reproductive health with neoliberal economic policies that have disproportionately harmed Black women and their families.  This brief explores three trends that together have significantly impacted the reproductive health landscape: the implementation of family planning restrictions, the increasing privatization in the health sector, and the proliferation of anti-choice policies since the 2022 Dobbs decision.

• Stopping The Loss Of Rural Maternity Care (Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform (CHQPR), April 2025): Rural maternity care is in a state of crisis, and more women and babies in rural communities will die unnecessarily until the crisis is resolved. This brief discusses this national crisis in depth and suggests some potential solutions to address the gap in rural communities. CHQPR implores Federal and state government officials, and private employers to take immediate action to ensure that all health insurance plans are paying adequately to support high-quality maternity care in every community.

Research Reports

• Stability in the Number of Abortions from 2023 to 2024 in US States Without Total Bans Masks Major Shifts in Access (The Guttmacher Institute, April 2025):  The Guttmacher Institute released new data showing that in 2024 there were 1,038,100 clinician-provided abortions in U.S. states without total abortion bans, an increase of less than 1% from 2023. In addition to offering state and national abortion estimates from January 2023 through January 2025, the latest round of data from the Monthly Abortion Provision Study also includes new estimates of the number of people traveling across state lines to obtain an abortion in 2024.

• BIRTH CONTROL UNDER THREAT: How Birth Control Rights and Access Are Being Undermined Since Roe v. Wade Was Overturned (National Women’s Law Center, April 2025): This new report from NWLC exposes the growing threats to birth control rights and access in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision. This report details how contraception has increasingly become a target of anti-reproductive rights efforts, following a strategy similar to those used against abortion, including legal challenges seeking to weaken long-established birth control protections, misinformation campaigns, and lawmakers refusing to pass laws that protect access to birth control.

• WHEN WOMEN ARE DESERTED: The Prevalence and Intersection of Abortion Care Deserts, Pregnancy Care Deserts, Broadband Internet Deserts, and Food Deserts in the United States (National Women’s Law Center, April 2025):  An overwhelming number of people in the U.S. face immense barriers to good health solely due to their geographic location, with Black and Latina women bearing the brunt of these systemic inequities. This report highlights the devastating reality of reproductive health care and resource deserts where abortion care, pregnancy care, broadband internet, and food access are severely limited or nonexistent.  The accompanying policy brief discusses how policymakers and advocates can reduce the prevalence and health impacts of these interconnected deserts through holistic investment in communities and cross-cutting policies.

• Maternal Mortality in the United States After Abortion Bans: Mothers Living in Abortion Ban States at Significantly Higher Risk of Death During Pregnancy and Childbirth (Gender Equity Policy Institute, April 2025):  This fourth publication in Gender Equity Policy Institute’s series on Reproductive Health in the United States, presents their analysis of 2019-2023 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data on maternal mortality to compare maternal health outcomes in banned states, supportive states, and the U.S. overall. The year 2023 is the most recent one for which annual data is publicly available from the CDC.

Journal Articles

• Pregnancy-Related Deaths in the US, 2018-2022 (JAMA Network Open, April 2025):  The U.S. has the highest rate of pregnancy-related deaths among high-income countries, and disparities continue to widen despite many of these deaths being largely preventable. During 2018 to 2022, there were 6283 pregnancy-related deaths, including 1891 late maternal deaths. In this cross-sectional analysis researchers found that there were large disparities by state and race and ethnicity, with American Indian and Alaska Native women having (106.3 deaths per 100 000 live births) and Black women (76.9 deaths per 100 000 live births) having the highest age-standardized annual and aggregated rate.  These concerning rates in the U.S. should be an urgent public health priority.

• Changes in abortion access after implementation of Medicaid coverage in Illinois: a retrospective analysis (BMJ Public Health, April 2025):  In 2018, Illinois implemented House Bill 40 (HB-40), allowing state funds to provide Medicaid coverage for abortion. This study aimed to quantitatively measure changes in access among Illinois residents after the law’s implementation, with a focus on changes experienced by Medicaid versus non-Medicaid patients. Researchers found that Medicaid coverage of abortion reduced insurance-related disparities for Medicaid patients, as shown by decreased gaps in average gestational age among Medicaid and non-Medicaid patients. It was also associated with increased medication abortions among Medicaid patients.

• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer+ Patients’ Preferences for Contraceptive Counseling and Experiences of Coercion in Contraceptive Care (The Journal of Sex Research, April 2025): In 2023, researchers used the online Prolific panel to survey U.S. reproductive-age people assigned female at birth about their contraceptive care. More than one-third (36%) of the sample identified as lesbian/gay, bisexual, asexual, pansexual, queer, questioning, or preferred to self-identify. Researchers found that compared to heterosexual participants, LGBQ+ participants were more likely to experience misalignment in how often they would like contraceptive counseling versus how often they received it.  Those who did receive contraceptive counseling were more likely than heterosexuals to experience pressure to use contraception.

Podcasts

• Everything You Need to Know About Abortion Later in Pregnancy (rePROs Fight Back / the Population Institute, April 2025):  Erika Christensen and Garin Marschall co-founded Patient Forward, a national strategy and advocacy organization, after their own personal experience with severe pregnancy complications requiring a later abortion. In this podcast, Erika and Garin talk about why people need abortions later in pregnancy, what barriers exist to accessing that care, and why government interference in pregnancy outcomes is overwhelmingly unpopular.

Webinars 

• What’s Changed Since Dobbs? Exploring the Evidence and Opportunities for Action (AcademyHealth’s Research Community on the Equity Impacts of Dobbs, April 2024): This webinar provides an overview of the latest evidence on how the Dobbs decision has influenced access, quality, and equity in reproductive health care. Policy experts share insights on current state and federal perspectives, emphasizing policymakers’ evidence needs and priorities that researchers can address.

• Misinformation, Maternal Mortality, and Abortion Bans (Reproaction, April 2025): In this webinar, you’ll hear from experts from Power to Decide and Emory University’s Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast (RISE)  working at the intersections of abortion access, maternal mortality, and public health to get an evidence-based view of the post-Dobbs maternal health landscape in the United States. They’ll also talk about what you can do as an advocate to support better maternal health outcomes, improve accountability, and counter anti-abortion misinformation in our post-Dobbs world.

We welcome your feedback on content and format. Are you a state legislator and have questions? You can reach out to Melissa Madera, Senior Associate of Research and Education, Reproductive Rights, at melissa@stateinnovation.org.  If you’re a researcher or partner and want us to highlight your research, send materials to melissa@stateinnovation.org.