Abortion Contraception Health Care LGBTQ Pregnancy Criminalization Reproductive Justice

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

July 31, 2025

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.

New Resources

Blog Posts

Griswold at 60: The Right to Contraception Under Threat (The National Health Law Program (NHeLP), June 2025): June 7, marked the 60th anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark Supreme Court decision that granted married people the right to contraception. The Court extended the right to unmarried persons in 1972. Despite this success, the right to contraception is under dire threat. This blog outlines how opponents to sexual and reproductive health care are chipping away at access to contraception in a number of ways, including a Title X funding freeze, proposed Medicaid funding cuts, and defunding reproductive health providers.

Abortion Restrictions Cost the US $64 Billion a Year—With Black Women Bearing the Brunt (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, June 2025): New research from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates that in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 16 states with the most restrictive abortion policies cost the U.S. economy a staggering $64 billion in economic losses annually. This blog post highlights that, while these bans harm many people, Black women—who are more likely to live and work in states with abortion bans— bear a disproportionate share of the burden since they are already navigating barriers rooted in racism and are being forced to contend with heavily restrictive policies that further erode their access to essential reproductive health care and economic security.

A ‘Shift In Kind’: A Medicaid Work Requirement Would Radically Change Health Policy (Health Affairs, June 2025): Medicaid work requirements would represent an enormous shift in U.S. health policy. This blog describes how work requirements would deprive the 41 states that have embraced expansion of their very ability to make health equity a core feature of health care in their states.

Executive Summary

Budget Reconciliation Act Implementation Dates, Funding, and Authorities for Medicaid & Select Health Provisions (The National Health Law Program (NHeLP), July 2025): These charts provide information about the implementation and funding for select health provisions of the enrolled version of the budget reconciliation bill that was signed into law on July 4, 2025. The charts identify relevant implementation dates, funding, and new CMS/HHS authorities for key Medicaid (Table 1), Medicare (Table 2), Marketplace (Table 3), and Rural Health Transformation Fund (Table 4) provisions.

Fact Sheets

IVF Under Attack: Anti-Reproductive Freedom Fertility Doctrines (Center for Reproductive Rights, June 2025): In vitro fertilization (IVF) is the most commonly used method of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in the United States, and has helped millions of people build their families. However, there are emerging threats to fertility care that undermine reproductive freedoms. This fact sheet explains some of these concerning legislative proposals, Arkansas’ Reproductive Empowerment and Support Through Optimal Restoration (RESTORE) Act and Targeted Restrictions of IVF Providers (TRIP) Bills, and their anticipated harmful impacts.

Birth Rights: A Resource for Everyday People to Defend Human Rights During Pregnancy and Birth (Pregnancy Justice, June 2025): In partnership with Elephant Circle and Birth Rights Bar, Pregnancy Justice published this fact sheet in English and in Spanish. This is version 2.0 of a publication they launched in 2020. Also check out Pregnancy Justice’s legal landscape page containing maps on fetal personhood laws/decisions, fetal homicide laws, and pregnancy exclusions in advance directive laws, and their resources page, where you’ll find all of their fact sheets and reports.

State-Level Abortion Restrictions Cost the US Economy $133 Billion (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, June 2025): In the three years since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, IWPR’s latest estimates show that the 16 states with the most restrictive abortion policies are responsible for over $64 billion in annual economic losses. Read more from this fact sheet on the cost of reproductive restrictions.

Title IX’s 53rd Anniversary (National Women’s Law Center, June 2025): This factsheet provides an overview of Title IX, a landmark federal civil rights law passed on June 23, 1972, guarantees all students – no matter their gender – equal opportunities in schools by to addressing longstanding disparities in education that harm women and girls, many of which still continue today, including rampant sexual harassment, inequitable athletic facilities, pregnant students being pushed out of school, and underrepresentation in certain educational fields. Yet, since the beginning of his second term, President Trump and his administration have prioritized weaponizing Title IX as a tool to harm transgender women and girls and unraveled existing protections.

Republican Budget Bill Could Close Over 140 Rural Labor and Delivery Units (National Partnership for Women & Families, June 2025): This fact sheet explains how Congress Republicans’ historic Medicaid cuts will have a devastating impact on rural hospitals and patients, particularly on pregnant women with low incomes and their children.

Gender-Affirming Care (Physicians for Reproductive Health, June 2025): This fact sheet serves as an educational tool as well as a means to destigmatize and demystify gender-affirming care, combat misinformation, and advance trans justice. It summarizes the different models of gender-affirming care so that providers, partners, and policymakers can learn more about gender-affirming care and transgender people’s experiences.

Immigrants Care: How Immigrant Early Educators Hold Up the Care Economy / Cuidado de inmigrantes: Cómo los educadores inmigrantes de la primera infancia sostienen la economía del cuidado (National Women’s Law Center, June 2025): Child care is an essential element of our social infrastructure and economic stability. Early educators are predominantly women (94 percent)– 22 percent of early educators are immigrant women. Yet, despite being the backbone of our child care system, child care workers are underpaid and undervalued, and harsh anti-immigrant policies threaten to further destabilize a precarious workforce supply and raise already high child care costs. This fact sheet provides data about immigrant early educators, and what advocates need to know about immigration policies and how it affects the early childhood education sector.

Trends in Criminalization and Legal Rights for Pregnant People: 2024-2025 Legislative Sessions in Review (Pregnancy Justice, July 2025): Pregnancy Justice tracked bills introduced during the 2024-2025 legislative cycle to identify trends that have the potential to increase the criminalization of pregnant people or that undermine pregnant people’s personhood. The 2024-2025 legislative cycle included an alarming number of bills that threaten the safety and well-being of pregnant people across the United States. There were some positive trends with several bills that center the needs of pregnant people who have substance use disorder and other bills that affirm the rights of pregnant people.

Across Degrees, Titles, and States, Black Women Earn Just 64 Cents on the Dollar (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, July 2025): Black Women’s Equal Pay Day—observed this year on July 10—marks how far into the next year Black women must work to earn what White men earned in the previous one. It’s a marker of lost opportunity, time, and wealth. In 2023, Black women earned just 64.4 cents for every dollar made by White men. Even among full-time year-round workers, Black women were paid only 66.5 cents for every dollar paid to White men. This pay inequity isn’t new, and at the current rate—and without any significant policy changes—it could take over 200 years to close this gap.

Research Briefs

Cost, Coverage, and Contraception: How Policy Can Improve Access for Community College Students (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, June 2025): Too many college students are forced to choose between their education and their reproductive health. IWPR’s latest report, part of their Connect for Success Initiative, breaks down how policy changes can remove financial and systemic barriers to contraception, and why that matters for college success.

Three Years Post-Dobbs, Abortion Bans & Criminalization Threaten More Than 14 Million Women Of Color (National Partnership for Women & Families, June 2025): Policies across the country that ban abortion and threaten to criminalize pregnant people for their reproductive health decisions expose abortion patients to health risks, pregnancy surveillance, and potential prosecution. New National Partnership for Women & Families analysis shows that three years after Dobbs, more than 31 million women of reproductive age live in the 22 states where abortion is banned or under threat– that’s 41% of all reproductive-age women in the United States. While people from all communities are harmed by abortion bans, Black women, women who live in rural areas, women veterans, and women who are economically insecure are especially likely to live in these states.

Removing Family Planning Organizations from Medicaid Would Harm Tens of Thousands of Wisconsinites (University of Wisconsin Collaborative for Reproductive Equity, June 2025): This brief outlines evidence of how the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” could severely limit access to essential healthcare services for tens of thousands of Wisconsinites, including access to birth control, cancer screenings, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing and treatment.

Legal and Regulatory Frameworks Are Undermining Midwifery Models of Care (Center for Reproductive Rights, June 2025): Midwifery models of care, centering trained, competent, licensed, and regulated midwives, are internationally recognized as a critical approach to delivering such care. This new legal research reveals that gaps and restrictions in national laws and regulations are obstructing the effective integration of midwifery care into health systems, undermining access to quality, respectful, and community-centered maternal health care in six jurisdictions: Colombia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Romania, and the state of Hawai‘i in the United States. This report provides a summary of the synthesized key findings and trends across jurisdictions, highlights key legal barriers and opportunities for reform, and the vital role of law in advancing midwifery models of care.

Research Reports

#WeCount report, April 2022 to December 2024 (Society of Family Planning, released on 23 June 2025): #WeCount is a time-limited reporting effort that aims to capture national shifts in abortion volume, by state and month, following the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade. This report includes data from April 2022 to December 2024. Some key finding of the study include:
- The total number of abortions was higher in 2024 than it was in 2023 or 2022.
- The majority of abortions occurred in-person; although, the number of abortions delivered via telehealth has continued to increase.
- Shield laws continue to facilitate access to medication abortion, with half of abortions provided via telehealth in 2024–an average of 12,330 abortions per month by the end of 2024.

Abortion Restrictions and Intimate Partner Violence in the Dobbs Era (National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2025): In overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision dramatically altered the landscape for reproductive health care access in the U.S. Prior research has highlighted the far-reaching impact of abortion restrictions for women and families, which extend beyond their proximate effects on abortions, births, and fertility. This brief provides some of the first causal evidence on how abortion restrictions in the post-Dobbs era have impacted women’s risk of exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV), the most common form of violence experienced by women. Leveraging information on IPV incidents reported to law enforcement from 2017-2023 combined with post-Dobbs changes in county-level travel distance to abortion facilities, researchers found that abortion restrictions significantly increased the rate of IPV for reproductive-aged women.

Journal Articles

Acceptability of misoprostol-only medication abortion dispensed by mail-order or retail pharmacy: a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews in the United States (Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, June 2025): There are two commonly used medication abortion options: misoprostol used with mifepristone,and misoprostol used by itself. Researchers conducted 31 interviews with U.S.-based individuals who had an abortion at home to understand their experiences with misoprostol-only among people in the U.S. Some key findings include: picking up the medications from a pharmacy felt familiar and a prescription from a physician legitimised the process; receiving medications from the mail- order pharmacy met preferences for privacy and anonymity; participants were generally satisfied with their abortion; and younger participants had a need for more emotional support. These findings inform the use of misoprostol-only regimens and innovations in abortion service delivery.

“I Live in a Doula Desert”: A Community-Engaged Study of Doula Care in Rural Georgia (Women’s Health Reports, June 2025): Maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States are significant and growing public health crises, and doulas could be part of the solution. This study examines the facilitators and barriers rural communities face in accessing doulas and ideas for expanding doula work in rural communities. As part of a larger-mixed methods, community-engaged project on full-spectrum doula care in Georgia, this study surveyed and interviewed doulas in Georgia from June 2022 to January 2023. The researchers’ main findings included: (1) significant perinatal and social service gaps in rural areas, (2) rural poverty that impedes perinatal options, including doula access, (3) long distances between doulas, rural clients, and health care, and (4) childbirth education disparities, resulting in knowledge gaps that doulas could fill. These results are relevant to national maternal health equity efforts in rural communities and can inform policies, programs, and future research including Medicaid reimbursement, doula training, and community-engaged research with doulas.

Interest in period pills in the United States: A nationally representative survey, 2021–2022 (Contraception, June 2025): Period pills (also sometimes called late period pills or missed period pills) are a method used to induce bleeding when a menstrual period is late and pregnancy is suspected but not confirmed. Period pills can consist of misoprostol, either alone or with mifepristone. A key distinction between period pills and medication abortion is the absence of a pregnancy test before taking the medications. Researchers used data from a nationally representative panel survey implemented from December 2021 to January 2022 among people ages 15 to 49 assigned female sex at birth to explore interest in and support for period pills after reading descriptive information about them. They found that there is substantial public interest in and support for period pills, which supports expanding options that enable people to control their fertility.

Podcasts

“Embedded: The Network” (Futuro Media / NPR / Latino USA, June 2025) This limited-run series traces the global movement that’s allowed millions of people around the world to have safe abortions outside of a clinic and the pills that make it possible. “The Network” tells the story of a loose collection of activists, supporters, and women across the Americas who discovered a method for safe, self-managed abortions and how they spread this knowledge around the world.

The Propaganda That Threatens the FDA’s Mifepristone Regulations (the Population Institute, rePROs Fight Back, June 2025): Mifepristone is the first of two medications that people will take during a medication abortion in the U.S. Mifepristone is extremely safe, but access to it is under blatant attack in the courts. In this podcast episode, Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, Public Health Scientist based at University of California San Francisco, and Julia Kaye, Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, talk about recent anti-abortion propaganda and how it could be used to shape the FDA’s regulations of medication abortion.

A Finished Term: Decided Supreme Court Cases Impacting LGBTQI+ and Repro Rights (the Population Institute, rePROs Fight Back, July 2025): From Skrmetti to Medina to Mahmoud, the Supreme Court has been busy issuing devastating rulings on cases that carry profound implications for LGBTQI+ health and rights and reproductive health and rights. In this episode of rePROs Fight Back, Chris Geidner, author of Law Dork, talks about these recent cases out of the Supreme Court, and what these rulings mean for our rights and wellbeing.

Webinars

The Role of the Viability Line in Pregnancy Criminalization (Pregnancy Justice, June 2025): Efforts to enshrine fetal personhood—which means granting legal rights to fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses—are escalating. And judicial decisions and even pro-abortion policies with fetal viability lines play a role in establishing fetal personhood. This webinar and the report invites us all to be accountable for the lines we draw and their impact on people’s lives. Check out the Pregnancy Justice full report that goes into more detail and a one-pager that summarizes the report.

Let’s Talk Science: The Science of Reproduction and the Future of Reproductive Care (UCLA): Check out this panel of four leading UCLA experts discussing their work regarding In-vitro Fertilization (IVF), emerging technologies, and the current landscape of IVF research, practice, and policy.

Interrupting Punitive Responses to Substance Use and Pregnancy (Pregnancy Justice, June 2025): This is meant for a law enforcement audience, with chapters specific to prosecutors, police, probation, and judges. The toolkit and companion video — which includes interviews with a prosecutor, person with lived experience, and a doctor — provide concrete, actionable, evidence-based approaches to address substance use and pregnancy. Watch the toolkit launch webinar with a great panel that includes Physicians for Reproductive Health’s Dr. Jamila Perritt and former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. It’s definitely worth a watch!

Immigrant Justice Is Still Reproductive Justice (Reproaction, June 2025): In this webinar, speakers discuss how safe working conditions, health care access, and freedom from state and gender-based violence offer all families the ability to thrive in safe and supportive environments.

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.

Saved Resources