Blog Series: SiX Repro’s ICYMI Research Roundup

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. This first installment of this series provides some research highlights from late 2024 and early 2025.

Fact Sheets

• Shield Laws for Reproductive and Gender-Affirming Health Care: A State Law Guide (UCLA Law, 2024):  This guide provides analysis of each state’s shield laws and the types of protections related to reproductive and gender-affirming health care offered in each shield law state.

Research Briefs 

• Contraceptive Challenges Facing Community College Students (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, January 2025): This brief highlights barriers to contraceptive access among young people attending community college and outlines policies and programs that can support access.

• The Road Not Taken: How Driving Distance and Appointment Availability Shape the Effects of Abortion Bans (National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2025): This study aims to estimate the effects of abortion bans on births at the county level, leveraging data on changes in driving distance and appointment availability at the nearest facility where abortion remains legal. Researchers found that bans alone increase births, but their total impact depends on geographic barriers to access. The largest increases occur among Black and Hispanic women, those without a college degree, and unmarried women.

Research Reports

• A Policy-Driven Research Agenda for Minor Adolescents and Abortion (Youth Reproductive Equity, 2024):  Minors, or adolescents under age 18, are vastly underrepresented in research on abortion in the United States. The overarching aim of this report is to present an actionable research agenda on abortion policy and its impacts on minors. There is also an Executive Summary of this research report.

• The Legal Assault on Pregnant People’s Personhood: Unpacking Fetal Personhood (Pregnancy Justice, 2024): This report provides a necessary overview of the legal framework supporting fetal personhood in a post-Dobbs world, examines the escalating application of fetal personhood principles since Roe’s fall, and explores the real-world implications and harms of this radical legal doctrine while identifying areas both for intervention and resistance.

• Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare in the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Community: Understanding Barriers to Access in Georgia (napawf, January 2025): In partnership with Emory University’s Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast (RISE), this report aims to explore access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care and to identify the individual, community, and policy-level barriers that Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities face in accessing care.

• Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Oversight: Lessons For The United States from Abroad (American Society for Reproductive Medicine, 2025): The American Society of Reproductive Medicine Center for Policy & Leadership released this white paper detailing oversight of IVF in the U.S. and abroad. The paper delves into the comprehensive regulatory framework governing ART practices, addressing the roles of key governmental bodies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and professional organizations, like ASRM and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), in establishing quality standards and guidelines.

Journal Articles

• Financial Barriers to Expanded Birth Center Access in New Jersey: A Qualitative Thematic Analysis (Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, January 2025):   This qualitative study explores the financial barriers that limit the sustainability and accessibility of freestanding birth centers. The researchers offer recommendations for how New Jersey and other states can expand access and choice for pregnant people, and improve maternal health access and equitable birth center sustainability.

• Changes in Support for Advance Provision and Over-the-Counter Access to Medication Abortion (JAMA Network Open, January 2025): The findings of this study suggest that national support for expanded access to medication abortion has grown. The researchers argue that alternative models of care, such as Advance Provision and Over The Counter, have the potential to offer a promising approach to abortion care, particularly for people living in abortion-restricted states.

• Navigating “regulatory fog”: Challenges to rigorous abortion research after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, (Contraception, January 2025):  This commentary discusses how regulatory systems designed to protect human subjects, including Institutional Review Boards and the National Institutes of Health’s Certificates of Confidentiality program, present challenges that create a “regulatory fog,” which stymies abortion scholarship. The authors argue that, in the current political environment, new regulatory constraints make it impossible for some researchers to conduct rigorous abortion research and protect participant confidentiality to the extent that they could before.

• “It Was So Easy in a Situation That’s So Hard”: Structural Stigma and Telehealth Abortion (Journal of Health and Social Behavior, January 2025):  Although abortion in the United States is a very common medical experience, it is extremely stigmatized. Researchers conducted 30 interviews and approached the data using a structural stigma framework in tandem with conceptualizations of felt, internalized, and enacted stigma. They found that telehealth reduces structural barriers to abortion and mitigates internal and interpersonal experiences of stigma, particularly because of the ability to avoid the traditional abortion clinic, which many interviewees viewed as the site where stigma is produced and experienced.

• US Abortion Bans and Fertility (JAMA Network, February 2025): This study provides evidence that fertility rates in states with abortion bans were higher than would have been expected in the absence of these restrictive policies, with the largest estimated differences among subpopulations experiencing the greatest structural disadvantages and in states with among the worst maternal and child health and well-being outcomes.

• US Abortion Bans and Infant Mortality (JAMA Network, February 2025): This study found that U.S. states that adopted abortion bans had higher than expected infant mortality rates after the bans took effect. The estimated relative increases in infant mortality were larger for deaths with congenital causes and among groups that had higher than average infant mortality rates at baseline, including Black infants and those in southern states.

• Exploring Adolescents’ and Young Adults’ Abortion Disclosure and Adolescents’ Experiences Navigating Colorado’s Parental Notification Law (Journal of Adolescent Health, April 2025): This study explores the narratives describing parental involvement among adolescents and young adults, and adolescents’ experiences navigating Colorado’s parental notification law.  Researchers found that even in a state like Colorado, where abortion is protected, the parental notification law and judicial bypass process may harm adolescents through added stress, forced disclosure, delaying care, and threatening their autonomy.

Podcasts

• rePROs Fight Back: A Policy Agenda for Achieving Reproductive Justice (the Population Institute, rePROs Fight Back): Reproductive justice is the human right to control our bodies, our sexuality, our gender, our work, and our reproduction. Listen to Bridgette Jackson, Director of Public Policy at In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, Kat Olivera, Director of Government Relations at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice (NLIRJ), and Fajer Saeed Ebrahim, Senior Policy Manager at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), talk about the reproductive justice policy agenda.

Webinars 

• Why and How to Connect Disability Justice and Reproductive Justice (The Century Foundation, 2024): In this webinar you will hear from policymakers and advocates who are bringing the disability and reproductive justice movements together.

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.