Senderowicz’s presentation at International Conference on Family Planning featured in Global Health Now

Leigh Senderowicz, ScD, assistant professor in the UW Ob-Gyn Division of Reproductive and Population Health, presented at the International Conference on Family Planning in Thailand in November. She presented “The effect of a postpartum IUD program on contraceptive method choice in Tanzania: Results from a cluster-randomized stepped-wedge trial” and was part of a session on contraceptive choice, coercion, and ethics.

Global Health Now, out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recapped Senderowicz’s presentation in the article “Contraceptive Coercion Still Happens.” The article describes the family planning community’s assumed shift away from coercive methods. But her research suggests otherwise:

“Senderowicz set out to hunt for evidence of ongoing contraceptive coercion, and to apply a reproductive justice lens to understand how communities make sense of it. Her team conducted 17 focus group discussions with 146 women in urban and rural settings in an anonymized sub-Saharan African country. (It was necessary to keep the country anonymized, she said, to avoid tying any negative associations of coercion to a single country.)

What they concluded: Contraceptive coercion was in fact very widely acknowledged in the communities they studied…”

Read the whole article here!