Sexual & reproductive justice
& health care
My research on sexual and reproductive healthcare takes a rights- and justice-oriented approach, attending to how care is organised, delivered, and experienced within unequal social and institutional contexts. I work across areas including contraceptive counselling and long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), access to sexual and reproductive health services for sexual and gender diverse people, and abortion service delivery. Rather than treating access or choice as individual matters, my work examines how healthcare systems, professional norms, and broader moral discourses shape people’s reproductive possibilities and their encounters with care.
Research focus
Developing Reproductive Justice as a framework for research, policy, & practice.
My scholarship makes a sustained contribution to reproductive justice (RJ) by bringing feminist, critical health psychology into dialogue with reproductive politics, healthcare systems, and lived experience. I extend RJ beyond its origins in activism and public health by showing how reproductive inequalities are produced and negotiated in everyday clinical encounters, service design, and policy discourses.
Across my work, I use qualitative methods to centre marginalised perspectives, interrogate assumptions about choice and responsibility, and develop RJ as a critical, analytically robust framework for understanding reproductive life across contexts.
Project
Balancing access & agency in LARC programming
Using a reproductive justice lens, this project moved beyond a focus on uptake of Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) to examine how choice, agency, and power operate in contraceptive care. We explored service users' and providers' perspectives on counselling and decision-making on LARC. Findings from Aotearoa New Zealand were analysed alongside a linked study in South Africa, offering a transnational perspective on LARC and contributing to the development of reproductive justice theory locally and globally.
Funder: Marsden Fund, Royal Society of New Zealand (2019–2023)
Associate Investigators: Prof Jade LeGrice (University of Auckland); Prof Catriona Macleod and Yanela Ndabula (Critical Studies in Sexualities & Reproduction, Rhodes University)
Book
Reproductive Justice: From the Margins to the Centre
This is one of the first dedicated volumes to bring reproductive justice into psychology as a critical framework for research, practice, and policy. Co-edited with Jabu Mavuso, the book brings together diverse and interdisciplinary contributions—from Indigenous approaches to sexual violence to gender-affirming primary and mental healthcare—that extend and deepen reproductive justice scholarship. Its aim is to help to move reproductive justice from the margins of psychological inquiry to the centre of applied and theoretical work. The volume has played a role in shaping debate and informing policy development in South Africa, where several contributors are located.
The book can be purchased directly from Lexington Press, use the discount code LXFANDF30 for 30% off.
