One year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion care has become a patchwork of confusing …

Marielam1, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supreme_Court_of_the_U.S._Building.jpg by Heidi Fantasia, UMass Lowell, [This article first appeared in The Conversation, republished with permission] In the year since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling struck down the constitutional right to abortion, society has been seeing the results of a post-Roe world. While there is no law in the U.S. that regulates what a man can do with his body, the reproductive health of women is now more regulated than it has been in 50 years. And the scope of reproductive health care that women can receive is highly dependent on where they live. This creates a system of inequalities and further exacerbates health disparities. I am a nurse practitioner who studies women’s reproductive health across the lifespan. My research found that college women are concerned about pregnancy, but they lack knowledge and skills about navigating sexual consent and often participate in sexual activity without explicit consent, leaving them at risk for not using contraception and exposure to sexually transmitted infections. These findings indicate that women are at risk of pregnancy at a historic time when women’s reproductive rights in the U.S. are restricted and not guaranteed.
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