Lori Freedman, associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology & reproductive sciences, is a sociologist and bioethicist at the UCSF who investigates the ways in which reproductive health care is shaped by our social structure and medical culture. Author of Willing and Unable: Doctors Constraints in Abortion Care (2010) and Bishops and Bodies: Reproductive Care in American Catholic Hospitals (Forthcoming 2023 Rutgers), she will discuss how Catholic hospitals—which treat about one in six patients—offer a perspective on how conscientious objection in medical practice operates at the institutional level and also provide a window into the medical perils of state abortion bans proliferating in the U.S. post-Roe.
Lori Freedman conducts sociological and bioethical research with Advancing New Standards In Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), a program of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at UCSF. In addition to being a Greenwall Faculty Scholar alumna, she is an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine at the National Academy of Medicine.
Freedman investigates the ways in which reproductive health care is shaped by our social structure and medical culture. Her book, Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care, is a qualitative study of the challenges to integrating abortion into physician practice. Unexpected findings from those physician interviews led her to research and write about the intersection of religion and health care, especially in the case of Catholic hospitals, with an interest in how conscientious objection in medical practice operates at the institutional level. Through qualitative interviews with Catholic hospital physicians and patients as well as national surveys of American women, her research lends insight into how institutional policies for reproductive care can be hidden from view, malleable, and/or obstructive to patient autonomy and wellbeing.
(Source: Lori Freedman and https://greenwall.org/faculty-scholars-program/our-faculty-scholars/lori-freedman-phd)
