Reproductive Health Care Inequities by Disability Status: Experiences With Providers and Barriers to Care.

Abstract

The literature has documented that many women with disability (WWD) report barriers to obtaining reproductive health care as well as poor experiences with providers when care is received. This project sought to compare barriers and experiences in reproductive health care for WWD to those of women without disability in the United States. Using representative data from the National Survey of Family Growth (2017-2019), we present weighted estimates of poor or fair experiences with providers by disability status, as well as weighted estimates of the proportion of women reporting types of barriers to services by disability status, among individuals identifying as women between the ages of 15 and 49. We then used weighted logistic regressions to compare barriers and experiences with providers by disability status. After controlling for potential confounders, women with any disability had 2.6 times higher odds as women without disability to rate their providers' respect for them as "poor" or "fair" (95% CI: 1.1-6.2). WWD did not significantly differ from women without disability in whether they reported more than one type of barrier (AOR = 1.3, 95% CI: 0.8-2.1), yet WWD had higher odds of reporting financial barriers compared to women without disability (AOR = 1.5, 95% CI: 1.02-2.2). While access to reproductive health care and experience with providers needs to be improved for all, these findings suggest that targeted efforts are needed to eliminate inequities for WWD in the reproductive health care system.