The Medical Care Blog is returning from its summer break this month. We hope you are feeling recharged and ready to dig deep again into health care and public health. We’re beginning with a series of retrospective posts to highlight the work of our contributors on prominent topics.
This week, we focus on a collection of five exceptional articles from our blog on reproductive health care. With Roe v. Wade now overturned, and the implications for public health becoming clearer, these five articles are very much worth revisiting.
It’s not just Roe v. Wade that’s at stake: Why we have to keep our eyes on Title X funding by Catherine Satterwhite and Megha Ramaswamy
Dr. Satterwhite and Dr. Ramaswamy, researchers at the University of Kansas, remind us that there are other policy avenues that affect reproductive health services. This post describes an attempt to limit Title X funding for health care providers that even discuss abortion with patients.
Religion-restricted healthcare and its effects on reproductive health needs by Rebekah Rollston
In this article from 2018, family medicine physician, Dr. Rollston, offers perspective on the clash between some religious practices and hospital and physician reproductive health services. She describes the unique role of Catholic hospitals and asks how we can balance these competing interests of patients.
Racism in reproductive health care and beyond by Libby Wetterer
Written in 2020, Dr. Wetterer (at the time she was a family medicine resident) describes the traumatic medical experience of one her black patients: her patient had been scheduled for a hysterectomy that she didn’t want. She connects this to racial biases in the health care system and to other forms of reproductive injustice.
Addressing reproductive coercion during the COVID-19 pandemic by Kimberly Randall et al
This article was written in 2020 by Dr. Randall (an emergency medicine physician) and her colleagues at the University of Kansas. They describe the rise in domestic violence and reproductive coercion during the pandemic. And they also offer a strategy to empower the survivors of domestic violence to make reproductive health choices.
Defining birth equity in Kansas–a three part series by Sapphire Garcia-Lies et al
This first post of a three-part series introduces us to the Kansas Birth Equity Network. Ms. Garcia-Lies is a doula and founder of the Wichita Birth Justice Society. She explains, with her colleagues, why the network needed to develop a vision for birth justice. They write of the process, “It is in pursuing [a vision of] equity that we can finally acknowledge the pain of the past…”