Health care provider decision making on reporting prenatal substance use

Discussions of alcohol and/or drug use during pregnancy often focus on the harms cause by the substance use. But research shows that policies and health care practices adapted in response also cause harm. Two practices that contribute to those harms are reporting of pregnant people’s substance use...

Telemedicine for birth control feels difficult for young adults experiencing food and housing insecurity

The COVID-19 pandemic motivated healthcare providers to expand telemedicine to prevent spreading the virus. Telemedicine offers a safe and effective way to support people starting or continuing contraception. It can help increase access to care, especially for people in rural areas or underserved...

Centering Black women’s abortion experiences

New research from Dr. Katherine Brown and team provides an alternative by centering the experiences of Black women and working to understand how they experience abortion care and the impact of structural racism on those experiences.

Meet Purba Chatterjee, connector working to decolonize global health

Serving as an HIV counselor in San Francisco at the height of the HIV epidemic helped Purba Chatterjee connect with her calling. Since growing up in India, she had always been interested in health but didn’t quite know how to make it a career. After taking a course on the biology of AIDS as an...

Clinics’ challenges providing birth control during the pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare providers have worked to balance patients’ access to health services with public health. While professional and public health organizations agreed that contraception is an essential service, providers also had to respond to social distancing mandates,...

Almost half of US ob-gyn residents won’t get abortion training if Roe v. Wade is overturned

By the end of June, the Supreme Court will issue a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a direct challenge to the right to abortion protected by Roe v. Wade. If Roe is overturned, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion.

Lifting FDA regulations could help family doctors provide medication abortion

In 2000, the Federal Drug Administration approved mifepristone for medication abortion. Many advocates hoped that the availability of the drug would allow primary care clinicians to integrate abortion services in their practices. However, more than 20 years later, most abortions still take place in...

Prenatal care is crucial to preventing congenital syphilis

Congenital syphilis—syphilis that is passed to a fetus while someone is pregnant—is increasing in the United States. If it goes untreated, it can lead to stillbirth, preterm birth and physical and neurological deficits. Treatment is effective almost 100% of the time when it’s given according to the...

Toward abolition medicine

Bixby members Monica Hahn, MD, and Nicholas Rubashkin, MD, contributed to the AMA Journal of Ethics issue Toward Abolition Medicine. Issue editor Osagie K. Obasogie writes about the need to center equity, inclusion and belonging, and that the journal issue “provides an opportunity to continue the...

Asking more questions leads to higher accuracy in self-assessment of pregnancy duration

ANSIRH set out to find out if more or different questions about the timing of the pregnancy could reduce uncertainty and therefore reduce the need for in-person testing.