In early May 2022, reproductive health researcher Liz Mosley was at a dinner celebrating her first day as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine when the news broke: A leaked draft of the Dobbs decision revealed the Supreme Court’s plan to gut abortion rights in the United States—the “worst-case scenario,” as one dinner guest put it.
Mosley also worried the ruling would upend her work as a scientist. She and her colleagues were in the process of conducting a study of Americans’ attitudes toward pregnancy, which included interviews and a survey asking 550 pregnant people ages 15 to 49 from around the country about options they’d considered. Some reproductive health clinics in Texas, from which she’d hoped to recruit—and where SB 8, an especially restrictive state law, was already making providers jittery— were spooked. “We lost Texas as a research site,” she told me. “The clinics just said the risk to their patients, legally, is too high.”
The decimation of reproductive health care has been predictably brutal in the two years since the Dobbs ruling. Abortion is now banned (or nearly so) in at least 17 states, dozens of providers have stopped offering abortions, and an untold number of clinicians have fled red states. You can add to that yet another post-Roe ripple: the challenges public health researchers like Mosley now face. Studies related to abortion have been delayed, limited, and blocked at a time when understanding the landscape couldn’t be more critical.
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