Report Publish Date: October 20, 2022
This journal article introduces and contextualizes new findings from the Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence, or RACE series, which are presented in a separate article by de la Rocha et al in the fall 2022 issue of Ethnicity & Disease.
The authors say the RACE series findings from the COVID Storytelling Project suggest moving beyond "a narrow focus on the outcomes of pregnancy” and instead using “more holistic framings that value the well-being of women and other birthing people more fully.”
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision allowing abortion to be banned accelerated changes in state policy that raise barriers to reproductive rights, especially for communities of color and low-income communities. These developments call for more research on the ways racism impacts reproductive health, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors say. They aim to clarify the relationship between threats to reproductive health and the pandemic.
“The reproductive health inequities portended by Dobbs may seem unrelated to the COVID pandemic; however, these inequities, COVID inequities and related social injustices (e.g., state-sanctioned violence) are inextricably linked to the structural forms of racism and the longstanding, coordinated efforts to restrict the rights of both BIPOC people and birthing people that undergird the inequities and injustices,” they write.
The authors survey the current landscape in the wake of Dobbs and suggest solutions that could create more reproductive options.
“Neither these threats to reproductive justice nor the collective ability to overcome them are new; they are clear echoes of the past.”
—Chandra L. Ford, Valencia Walker, Joia Crear-Perry, Jessica D. Gipson, UCLA-Charles R. Drew University COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity
Evidence shows that reproductive health outcomes cannot be improved through clinical care alone; change also requires addressing unequal access, restrictive policies, racism, and economic conditions.
This fall 2022 issue of Ethnicity & Disease contains the next installment of the Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence (RACE) Series. The purpose of the RACE Series is to disseminate results from studies conducted by the UCLA-CDU COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity as the findings become available. The research examines the persistence of racism and other social injustices (e.g., due to housing discrimination, certain policing practices and unjust sentencing laws) during the pandemic to illuminate key implications for COVID inequities and potential targets for intervention.
The findings presented in this issue of the series focus squarely on emerging threats to reproductive justice. Reproductive justice is a liberatory framework created to capture the complex, intersectional social realities by which structural oppression influences sexual and reproductive health. Thus, this issue provides a near real-time response to the US Supreme Court’s consequential decision in Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization et al,1 which effectively overturned the rights to abortion established in 1973 in the landmark case, Roe v. Wade. The Dobbs decision will have immediate as well as long-lasting impacts on health inequities. To help explain its key implications for health inequities and inform strategies to respond to them decisively, I [CLF] invited thought leaders in reproductive justice [JCP], maternal and infant health inequities [VW], and reproductive decision-making and control [JG] to share their expertise on the matter in this commentary. Together, the findings and discussion of Dobbs place present reproductive justice concerns within the contexts of the concurrent COVID pandemic and the increasingly restrictive environment surrounding reproductive health and reproductive justice in the United States.
Ethn Dis., October 20, 2022. doi: 10.18865/ed.32.4.351
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people:
Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence (RACE) Series: The purpose of the RACE Series is to disseminate results from studies conducted by the UCLA-CDU COVID-19 Task Force on Racism & Equity. The article featured on this page, as well as the three below, are part of the series.
Journal article uses a majority Black city as case study to describe how Black Americans’ ongoing experiences of crisis required different health communication.
Journal article introduces two papers published in the Rapid Assessment of COVID Evidence, or RACE series.
Journal article uses a majority Black city as case study to describe how Black Americans’ ongoing experiences of crisis required different health communication.
