Health Care for Non-Men in the Age of COVID-19
August 16, 2020
Original post from Ujima
“In a study done, entitled Early Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Findings from the 2020 Guttmacher Survey of Reproductive Health Experiences, it was found that due to different disruption variables, COVID-19 will have “major consequences for reproductive health goals and behaviors, access to care and far beyond,” including exposure to IPV, particularly acts of sexual violence or reproductive control. While this report only collected data from cisgendered women in the United States, the information is still fruitful. It demonstrates that almost all previous large scale disasters have disproportionately affected women’s reproductive care, and COVID-19 is proving to be no different. The report also pays attention to women from already disadvantaged backgrounds, either economically or due to some sort of racial/ethnic bias. We see that “Black women and Hispanic women were more likely than white women to state that because of the pandemic, they wanted to have children later or wanted fewer children,” and that access to in-person health care regarding birth control was harder among “Black and Hispanic women than among white women, and more common among queer women than among straight women.””