Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

Addressing Disparities in Reproductive Health

Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

INTRODUCTION

In July 2024 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) held a webinar¹ to examine promising strategies to reduce disparities in reproductive health care outcomes. Speakers, including health care providers and researchers, discussed underlying issues and inequities affecting access to and quality of health care services, the resulting disparities in health care outcomes, and the disproportionate effects on some populations. Speakers offered examples of promising programs and practices to address barriers to high-quality, patient-centered reproductive health care at different points in the reproductive life cycle. The discussions focused on specific populations, including individuals with disabilities, individuals who are incarcerated, and individuals who are forcibly displaced.

This Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief was prepared as a factual summary of presentations and key themes discussed by speakers. The views contained in the proceedings are those of individual workshop participants and should not be viewed as providing consensus conclusions or recommendations of the National Academies.

KEYNOTE

Rachel Hardeman, University of Minnesota, began the webinar by defining and discussing racism. Her research and work at the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity (CARHE) at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health is based on the notion that anti-Black racism is the root or fundamental cause of racial inequities in health and well-being for Black people, including stark inequities in reproductive health outcomes. She said CARHE leverages two key definitions of racism to frame its work:

• Structural racism, as defined by Dr. Zinzi Bailey, is “the totality of ways in which society fosters racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing inequitable systems that in turn reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources which together affect the risk of adverse health outcomes” (Bailey et al., 2017).
• Racism, as defined by Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, is “a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks, which is what we call race, and due to this system of structure and opportunity, it disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and

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stops the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources” (American Public Health Association, n.d.).

Hardeman reviewed the historical contexts of racism as they relate to the contemporary realities of reproductive health in the United States. She said legal and medical objectification of Black enslaved women’s bodies played an especially important role in the entrenchment of racism in the United States and its manifestation as a public health crisis today. As far back as 1619, she said, colonial Virginia legislators made Black women’s childbearing a centerpiece of the system of chattel slavery when they passed a law stating that the status of a child would follow that of the child’s mother (Owens and Fett, 2019). When both Britain and the United States banned the transatlantic slave trade, enslavers began to bank their economic future increasingly on the fertility of enslaved Black women. Black women were deemed valuable insofar as they could produce free labor for enslavers, Hardeman stated, so that economic advantage to enslavers came at the cost of a Black woman’s personhood and autonomy.

Hardeman noted that this history cannot be separated from current data related to reproductive health and maternal health outcomes in the United States. She said the United States is the only industrialized nation that has a rising maternal mortality rate (Gunja et al., 2023), and greater risk for experiencing maternal mortality among Black and Indigenous populations is contributing to this rate. Hardeman said that Black birthing people are three to four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts, regardless of socioeconomic status. For every maternal death, more than 100 birthing people experience severe maternal morbidity (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.), which are serious health complications of labor and delivery. Black birthing people are also more likely to suffer from severe maternal morbidity than their white counterparts.

Hardeman emphasized that Dr. Arline Geronimus’s “weathering hypothesis” is necessary to understand reproductive health outcomes (Geronimus, 1992). The weathering hypothesis states that chronic exposure to social and economic disadvantage leads to accelerated decline in physical health outcomes and could partially explain racial disparities in a variety of health conditions. Hardeman expanded on this idea, sharing that “constant exposure to structural racism, constant exposure to a fear, for instance, of police violence in one’s community creates a persistent fight or flight response in the body, releasing hormones and neurotransmitters that are going to contribute to diseases like hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic diseases that are leaving Black birthing people less healthy as they go into pregnancy and childbirth.” She stated that the weathering effect is associated with a shorter lifespan for Black women compared to their White counterparts.

Hardeman stated her belief in Reproductive Justice² as the solution to reducing reproductive health disparities. She explained that Reproductive Justice as a movement and a framework was developed in 1994 by a group of Black women who recognized that the leadership behind the women’s rights movement was not representative of those closest to the pain of structural racism and other forms of marginalization. The Reproductive Justice movement includes the recognition that it’s important to fight for the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and, equally important, the right to bear a child and raise that child in safe and sustainable communities.

Hardeman closed by encouraging researchers to think about the ways history is manifesting in health inequities today. She emphasized that research and evidence co-created with the experts in communities should guide future work and that willingness to be creative is an important part of this effort. She highlighted the Roots Community Birth Center (Roots),³ a freestanding midwife-led community birth center based in Minneapolis, as an innovative example. Roots employs a culturally centered model of care that centers cultural, physical, emotional, structural, and mental safety. Hardeman said research conducted in partnership with Roots shows their antiracist care model results in many benefits for patient health (Hardeman et al., 2020), well-being (Kar-

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beah et al., 2022), and feelings of autonomy and respect (Almanza et al., 2022).

REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH OF ADOLESCENTS AND ADULTS WITH DISABILITIES

Willi Horner-Johnson, Oregon Health & Science University, discussed the reproductive health of individuals with disabilities. She offered some historical context then discussed disability-specific disparities and promising strategies to address these disparities.

Based on national data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)⁴ almost 29 percent of adults in the United States have a disability (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024). Despite the reported size of this population, Horner-Johnson noted, this group has received relatively little attention from a health equity perspective, especially with regard to reproductive health. The reproductive health of people with disabilities throughout U.S. history has been heavily influenced by the eugenics movement, which promoted the belief that people with disabilities weaken the gene pool and should not reproduce, Horner-Johnson said. This belief, she noted, was epitomized in the Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision of 1927, which allowed the state of Virginia to involuntarily sterilize thousands of people. Many other states also enacted compulsory sterilization laws in the early twentieth century (DenHoed, 2016; Powell, 2022).

Horner-Johnson stated that although we’ve changed some of our laws and practices since the heyday of the eugenics movement, many misconceptions and ableist views still linger, including two longstanding and contradictory views of people with disabilities as either oversexed or not sexual at all. The view of people with disabilities as uncontrollably oversexed has led to severe restrictions to try to prevent what’s seen as inappropriate behavior, she said (Powell, 2022). On the other hand, she went on, when people with disabilities are viewed as nonsexual, their sexual health needs are completely ignored. “Suppressing or ignoring sexuality deprives people with disabilities of information, skills, and opportunities to engage in healthy sexual relationships, which increases their risk of coercion and sexual violence, sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancies,” Horner-Johnson said, noting that there is a growing body of research documenting that all of these conditions disproportionately affect people with disabilities. She also said that pregnant people with disabilities are at increased risk of complications such as gestational diabetes, hypertension, depression, and severe maternal morbidity, and the risk of severe maternal morbidity is especially high for Black women with disabilities. She presented data from births in California showing that Black women with physical disabilities are more than six times more likely to experience severe maternal morbidity than White women without disabilities.

Horner-Johnson pointed to a number of health care issues that contribute to disparities in reproductive health outcomes for people with disabilities. For example, she said, recent analyses of data from the National Survey of Family Growth⁵ found that young women with disabilities are less likely to be screened for cervical cancer and less likely to have received human papillomavirus virus vaccination than their counterparts without disabilities, increasing their risk of cervical cancer (Hoyle et al., 2024). She said women with disabilities are also less likely to be screened for breast cancer so they’re at greater risk of having cancer detected at a later stage and having worse outcomes. They are also significantly more likely to be sterilized at younger ages, she continued. Finally, she noted, they experience numerous barriers to receipt of other forms of contraceptive care, including physical barriers when in-person appointments are needed and attitudinal barriers from clinicians who may overlook or dismiss needs for reversible contraceptives.

Horner-Johnson stated that with regard to perinatal health care, pregnant people with disabilities, especially intellectual or cognitive disabilities, are less likely to receive prenatal care in the first trimester, and the quality of labor and delivery care they receive may differ. She noted that some research indicates that obstetric clinicians are typically not well prepared to provide care that fully addresses the needs and concerns of people with disabilities. Further, she said several studies have found

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that women with disabilities are more likely to deliver by C-section,⁶ and there is some evidence that women are being scheduled for C-sections without adequate consideration of whether a vaginal delivery might be possible.

Research on the reproductive health of people with disabilities is still young, Horner-Johnson said, and as yet there is little intervention research. However, she named some promising practices, emerging tools, and existing resources.

First, Horner-Johnson discussed greater training for health professionals. Although there are currently no national requirements for including disability education in medical school curricula, she said the Alliance for Disability and Health Care Education is advocating for minimum requirements and has developed a set of disability core competencies for health care education (Alliance for Disability in Health Care Education, n.d.), and the New Hampshire Disability and Health Program offers free online trainings with continuing education credits. She noted that one of the New Hampshire program’s modules teaches strategies for providing disability-competent, responsive health care and screenings (Oregon Office on Disability and Health, n.d.a), and the other module focuses on accessible communication (Oregon Office on Disability and Health, n.d.b).

Next, Horner-Johnson discussed screening tools and other resources that health care professionals can apply in their practice. The Abuse Assessment Screen-Disability (The National Health Collaborative on Violence and Abuse, n.d.), a four-question screener, includes questions about disability-specific forms of abuse. This tool assesses for violence from any source, not just intimate partners, because people with disabilities may be exposed to a broader range of potential perpetrators, such as personal care attendants, Horner-Johnson said. Another resource being developed is a postpartum mental health toolkit for professionals providing care to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.⁷ The toolkit includes information about identifying postpartum depression and anxiety symptoms in people with intellectual and developmental disabilities as well as communication strategies for discussing mental health and treatment options. Horner-Johnson noted that other researchers are looking at ways to better accommodate the needs of those with disabilities. For example, she mentioned Michael McKee and his colleagues at the University of Michigan, who have developed a tab in their electronic health record that prompts health care professionals to ask about and document needed accommodations (e.g. height-adjustable exam tables, sign language interpreters, assistants to help with completing paperwork) so those supports can be available in future appointments. These researchers are testing use of the accommodations tab in prenatal care as part of the National Center for Disability and Pregnancy Research.

Horner-Johnson discussed greater accessibility and availability of health resources for people with disabilities. For example, she mentioned a preconception education program (McCabe et al., n.d.) for women with physical disabilities from the National Center for Disability and Pregnancy Research, led by John Harris at the University of Pittsburgh. The program includes a one-on-one nurse-led session to provide information about pregnancy-related health risks and actions people can take to improve their health before getting pregnant and to maintain their health during pregnancy. Pilot testing shows that the program is successful in increasing participants’ knowledge, Horner-Johnson said. She also mentioned another resource from the National Center for Disability and Pregnancy Research: the Accessible Pregnancy Action Plan, a birth plan template developed by Kara B. Ayers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital that prompts patients to identify supports they may need during labor and delivery.

Horner-Johnson described decision aids as tools that can help people with disabilities as they consider whether they want to try to get pregnant. She said these have mostly focused on physical disabilities, but she and colleagues are also developing interactive decision aids for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

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Another project she co-leads is developing a sexual and reproductive health care toolkit intended to support adolescents with disabilities and young adults of all genders in being active partners in their sexual and reproductive health care.

REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AMONG INCARCERATED INDIVIDUALS

Carolyn Sufrin, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, discussed the reproductive health and health care needs of incarcerated individuals, focusing on pregnancy.

Sufrin presented U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics estimating that on any given day there are more than 180,000 adult females in U.S. jails and prisons (Carson and Kluckow, 2023; Zeng, 2023). Most of these individuals are of reproductive age, and most are already mothers and primary caregivers to young children (Carson and Kluckow, 2023; Maruschak et al., 2021). Beyond a one-day count the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that there are more than 1.2 million arrests of adult females each year (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2022). Sufrin noted that incarcerated women have a higher prevalence of mental health diagnoses, substance use disorders, and previous physical and sexual trauma compared to incarcerated men and non-incarcerated women. Sufrin stated that understanding the broader historical, social, racial, and economic context of maternal and reproductive health in the United States is essential to understanding the reproductive health care of incarcerated individuals. In comparison to White women, she noted, Black women are two to three times more likely to be incarcerated, and Native American and Alaska Native women are over four times more likely (Carson and Kluckow, 2023). She said these outcomes are tied to racial structures of oppression, including what some researchers call the “family policing system” and what others call the child welfare system that disproportionately surveils and separates Black families and divests from Black communities (Roberts, 2022).

Sufrin shared that while it is difficult to grasp how common pregnancy is among incarcerated individuals given the dearth of available data in this area, she had some findings from the 2016–2017 Pregnancy in Prison Statistics study,⁸ which was led by her and her research team. The study collected monthly pregnancy outcomes data from 22 state prison systems, from all federal prisons, and from 6 county jails over the course of a year. From this data the researchers estimated that there are 3,000 admissions of pregnant people to U.S. prisons each year and 55,000 admissions to U.S. jails each year (Sufrin et al., 2019, 2020).

To understand access to pregnancy care and the pregnancy experiences of those in custody, Sufrin noted it was necessary to first review key legal and policy decisions shaping these issues. As a result of the 1976 Supreme Court case Estelle v. Gamble, she said, incarcerated individuals have a constitutional right to health care and institutions of incarceration are required to provide this care. However, the ruling did not lay out standards or any system of oversight for this care, so as Sufrin noted, there is “great variability in what pregnancy and other care looks like for incarcerated women.” Sufrin stated that the experience of being pregnant and incarcerated is one that research and the narratives of people with lived experience have shown is generally characterized by isolation, fear, and uncertainty. She said incarceration inherently limits one’s autonomy, and incarcerated women have little say in the conditions of their birth; for example, pregnant individuals can be shackled during pregnancy and labor, even though 41 states and the District of Columbia have laws prohibiting this practice.⁹ If someone gives birth in custody, they are typically separated from their newborn within 24 to 72 hours of when they are discharged from the hospital and returned to prison or jail. Sufrin said that while some prisons and jails provide access to a reasonable measure of prenatal care, generally there is little or inconsistent prenatal care in prison and jail and even less postpartum care and lactation support. For example, one aspect of pregnancy care that is lacking for incarcerated individuals is access to medications for opioid use disorder. Sufrin stated that even though this has long been the standard of care, very few jails provide full or consistent access to such medications. At facilities that do provide access to these medications in pregnancy, she said the majority discontinue them postpartum, forcing postpartum individuals to go through opioid withdrawal.

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The Pregnancy in Prison Statistics study, Sufrin said, also found that few abortions occurred during incarceration in 2016 to 2017, and abortion policies within the studied prisons and jails were not always consistent with federal or state law. A few institutions did not allow abortions, some allowed abortion only in the first trimester, and many required people to pay out of pocket for the abortion and other aspects of care, such as transportation to an abortion clinic. Sufrin said her qualitative research has shown that pregnant incarcerated individuals may view themselves as the state’s property because that is how the system of care under incarceration conditions them to see themselves, devaluing their reproductive worth. She shared two quotes to illustrate the experiences of incarcerated individuals trying to access abortion while in custody: one woman said, “We’re not looked at as people, we’re looked at as inmates, so all of our decisions are taken from us, even with our pregnancies,” and another said, “I was told that if you wanted [an] abortion when you’re here, you can’t, because you were the state’s property” (Sufrin et al., 2023).

Sufrin went on to discuss the effects of state abortion laws since the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision: “Incarcerated individuals who are in a state that now ban[s] abortion do not have the freedom of movement to travel to another state if they need an abortion. Even if they get released from prison or jail while they’re still pregnant, most are going to be on probation and parole, and cannot travel freely out of state” to access abortion care.

Sufrin ended her remarks with a discussion of promising programs and strategies to improve access and quality of health care for pregnant incarcerated individuals. She highlighted the program led by the University of Minnesota to provide enhanced prenatal perinatal support through doulas,¹⁰ called E4P: Enhanced Perinatal Programs for People in Prison.¹¹ Working with partners in eight state prison systems, the program is implementing doula programs to provide support for incarcerated individuals during pregnancy and childbirth and after pregnancy. In addition to increasing access to doulas, Sufrin suggested strategies to improve the quality and quantity of care, including establishing mandatory standards of care and oversight, providing comprehensive abortion care (although this may be restricted due to state-specific regulations since the Dobbs decision) and prenatal care, and ensuring access to medications for opioid use disorder. Further, Sufrin stated that there is a need to collect more data on the health of incarcerated individuals, train custody staff on urgent maternal warning signs, reduce harm from hospitals by training hospital staff to treat pregnant incarcerated individuals with dignity and respect, provide lactation support, provide increased access to postpartum and pregnancy mental health care in custody, and ensure facilities adhere to anti-shackling laws. She said that while these strategies are essential, what is also needed “is to end births in custody,” and Minnesota, again, is leading the way on this with the Healthy Start Act passed in 2021 that “allows alternatives to incarceration for pregnant and postpartum individuals.”

REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH OF FORCIBLY DISPLACED PEOPLE

Gunisha Kaur, Weill Cornell Human Rights Impact Lab (HRIL), discussed the reproductive health of forcibly displaced people.

According to Kaur, the primary causes of global displacement—war, violence, and persecution—together with climate change and associated natural disasters have resulted in the displacement of more than 100 million adults and children worldwide. Most are young and otherwise healthy, she said; 40 percent are younger than 18. She added that the number of forcibly displaced people is increasing by nearly 50,000 people each day and emphasized that understanding the health care needs and backgrounds of this population is critical given that health care providers are increasingly likely to encounter these individuals as patients in arrival countries.

Kaur discussed her work at the HRIL and the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights (WCCHR), a medical student–run human rights clinic where over a hundred refugee patients from all over the world are seen each year. She said each patient arrives with complex life histories intertwined with their medical histories, and that is particularly true for women and girls who face sexual violence in their home countries, sexual abuse when they

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arrive in their host countries like the United States, or trafficking during their migration journeys. For those people who have survived torture and are seeking asylum in the United States, she said, WCCHR provides forensic medical evaluations, which involves translating physical and psychological scars into words for an immigration judge. Kaur stated that only two percent of the world’s migrants cross international borders and boundaries as asylum seekers, and in the U.S. and other high-income countries asylum seekers are often highly educated and have vast social networks and the financial resources to risk seeking asylum.

Kaur stated that globally there is a major gap in our understanding of the health and health care needs of asylum seekers and the HRIL’s goal is to help address this gap and establish a standard of care for these patients through a rigorous scientific approach. Most of the center’s work is quantitative through clinical and database research, she said, but they also engage with mixed methods and qualitative research. Kaur shared that in a systematic review and meta-analysis of global methods of harm (Milewski et al., 2023), covering more than 266 studies that included more than 100,000 individuals, the center found that systematic torture,¹² was documented in more than 100 of the world’s countries. Importantly, the experiences of women and men differed; women were significantly more likely than men to experience torture such as rape or burning.

Additionally, the center’s research found that female genital mutilation/cutting (FGMC)¹³ had implications for the type, severity, and qualities of post-trauma health issues experienced by female patients and had significant implications for their reproductive health. Kaur noted that while the World Health Organization calls for a universal ban on FGMC, more than 200 million women and girls (Lurie et al., 2020) throughout the world are affected by this ongoing practice. In 2020 over half of the top ten countries of origin for refugees admitted to the United States practiced FGMC. In a study on the effects of FGMC on gynecologic and obstetric outcomes, WCCHR found evidence that individuals who had experienced FGMC were at higher risk for dysuria or perineal tears and prolonged labor or episiotomies and often endured disrespect from Western medical professionals threatening provider–patient relationships and outcomes. Kaur also discussed a survey of more than 400 Somali refugees who gave birth in Canada after experiencing FGMC, which found that most of those patients reported receiving offensive comments or being regarded with disgust or shock. Other studies show that two out of five women affected by FGMC stated they would not return to the same hospital for future deliveries, and some stated that they would prefer not to go to any hospital for future deliveries because of their experiences. “When we look at reproductive health of refugee women, we find that these social histories, what many people would call the social determinants of health—war, violence, persecution, their experiences with Western medical providers—[have] a deep and profound influence on their physical and mental health and well-being. And it’s a complex interplay between one’s life experiences and their physical and mental health,” Kaur said.

To identify solutions to address issues around the reproductive health of forcibly displaced individuals, Kaur said, it is critical to understand the patient population. She explained that when people hear the word refugee, they don’t typically assume that these are people who can navigate a health care system. However, she said, several studies have found that although refugees leave their home countries with few personal belongings, they are likely to have smartphones. HRIL studies have found that over 90 percent of U.S. asylum seekers have smartphones, and 100 percent have the digital literacy to engage in digital health interventions (Bhandari et al., 2022; Pilato et al., 2023). Kaur stated that digital technologies, wearable devices, and smartphones can be used to bring health equity to this vulnerable population. One ongoing HRIL study, for example, is looking at the early diagnosis of hypertensive disorders in pregnant refugee women, and the ability to connect these high-risk patients to health care providers, either virtually or in person. AI and machine learning were trained to predict which patients were potentially high risk and to triage them for care.

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Kaur ended her remarks by discussing three reasons why developing transformative opportunities to improve the reproductive health of refugee patients is important. First, an individual’s experience of care in their host country can leave a deep mark on their life trajectories. Second, as war, violence, and climate change escalate across the world the number of refugee patients in U.S. based clinical practices will grow and clinicians will need to know how to care for women who have experienced FGMC, sexual violence, or trafficking. Third, Kaur shared her sentiment that “migrants are people just like you or me, who have just had an unfortunate turn of events in their life history,” and our shared humanity makes it our responsibility to continue to find ways to support the health of this population.

REFERENCES

DISCLAIMER This Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief has been prepared by Priyanka Nalamada as a factual summary of what occurred at the meeting. The statements made are those of the rapporteur or individual workshop participants and do not necessarily represent the views of all workshop participants; the planning committee; or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS Claire Brindis (Chair), University of California, San Francisco; Andreia Alexander, Indiana University School of Medicine; Elizabeth Ananat, Barnard College, Columbia University and National Bureau of Economic Research; Wanda Barfield (Ex Officio Member), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Bruce N. Calonge, Colorado School of Public Health; Alison N. Cernich (Ex Officio Member), Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Judy Chang, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Ellen Wright Clayton, Vanderbilt University; Cat Dymond, Atlanta Birth Center; Michelle Bratcher Goodwin, Georgetown University School of Law; Barbara J. Grosz, Harvard University; Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing; Lisa Harris, University of Michigan; Justin R. Lappen, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine; Monica McLemore, University of Washington School of Nursing and School of Public Health; Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum, Rice University; Sara Rosenbaum, George Washington University; Yvette Roubideaux, Colorado School of Public Health; Alina Salganicoff, KFF; Susan C. Scrimshaw, University of Illinois at Chicago; LeKara Simmons, AMAZE; Melissa Simon, Northwestern University; Lisa Simpson, University of South Florida School of Public Health and George Washington University School of Public Health; Tracy A. Weitz, American University and Center for American Progress; Katherine L. Wisner, Children’s National Hospital and George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

*The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s planning committees are solely responsible for organizing the workshop, identifying topics, and choosing speakers. The responsibility for the published Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief rests with the institution.

REVIEWERS To ensure that it meets institutional standards for quality and objectivity, this Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief was reviewed by Sangmi Kim (Emory University) and Lisa Kane Low (University of Michigan). Leslie Sim (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) served as the review coordinator.

SPONSORS This workshop was supported by the National Academy of Sciences W.K. Kellogg Foundation Fund.

STAFF Julie Pavlin, Senior Board Director; Ashley Bear, Board Director; Natacha Blain, Senior Board Director; Priyanka Nalamada, Program Officer; Laura DeStefano, Director of Strategic Communications & Engagement; Melissa Laitner, Senior Program Officer, Special Assistant to the President; Adaeze Okoroajuzie, Senior Program Assistant; Kavita Shah Arora, Consultant.

For additional information regarding the webinar, visit http://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/standing-committee-on-reproductive-health-equity-and-society.

Suggested citation: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2024. Addressing disparities in reproductive health: Proceedings of a workshop—in brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/28576.

Health and Medicine Division Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education National Academy of Medicine Policy and Global Affairs Copyright 2024 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.