My Contraceptive Choice: A Decision Support Tool for College Women.

We developed an online decision aid, My Contraceptive Choice (MCC), for college women to select the appropriate birth control methods. MCC consists of a short quiz, customized recommendations, and educational resources. Evaluations from a focus group, an online survey, and test cases showed that the tool is accurate, usable, and useful. Future work is required to further improve MCC's compliance with user needs/preferences and to include additional resources to make it more useful.

Development of an Online Contraceptive Decision Aid for College Women.

Lack of knowledge in highly efficient contraceptive methods led to low rates of adoption and misuse of these methods by young women. The existing online tools for contraceptive decisions have flaws. To address this critical need, we developed a prototype online contraception decision aid for college women. For this purpose, we conducted a focus group interview for needs assessment. We designed a scoring system to provide accurate and customized recommendations based on a user's preferences. We implemented the tool with specific functions to collect users' needs and preferences in selecting specific contraceptive methods, to present the customized recommendations, to provide side-by-side comparison of all contraceptive methods, and to recommend additional resources. Preliminary data seem to indicate positive evaluations of the tool. Future work is required to examine the generalizability of the findings and to have full implementations of the tool for real world use.

The age of LARC: making sexual citizens on the frontiers of technoscientific healthism.

Routinely positioned as the 'first-line option' for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) promotion efforts have come under critical scrutiny by reproductive justice advocates for the extent to which public health actors' preference for LARC devices may override potential users' ability to freely (not) choose to use contraception among an array of options. We identify LARC promotion discourse as constituting 'The Age of LARC': multifarious strategies for producing responsible sexual citizens whose health behaviours are empowered via a LARC-only approach to contraceptive use. We suggest that immediate postpartum LARC insertion policies, which have proliferated in the U.S. since 2012, exemplify the new era of LARC hegemony, in which urgency, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and outcomes dominate both health policy and clinical practice around these contraceptive technologies. By following these efforts to facilitate access to and use of immediate postpartum LARC, we find a discourse on sexual citizenship that paradoxically constructs sexual health freedom through the use of a single class of contraceptive technologies.

What's the Use? Disparate Purposes of U.S. Federal Bioethics Commissions.

In the forty-year history of U.S. bioethics commissions, these government-sanctioned forums have often demonstrated their power to address pressing problems and to enable policy change. For example, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, established in 1974, left a legacy of reports that were translated into regulations and had an enormous practical impact. And the 1982 report Splicing Life, by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, became the basis for the National Institutes of Health's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee as well as for the Food and Drug Administration's developing "Points to Consider" when contemplating the introduction of recombinant DNA into human beings. Some efforts of bioethics commissions, however, are not tightly connected to policy change or to outcomes directly linked to a specific report. While direct policy impact is indeed a useful metric for government bioethics commissions, it is not their only legitimate utility. For instance, bioethics commissions can also be incubators for deliberation on a hot topic, giving policy-makers time to think through options while the political heat has some time to dissipate. Or a bioethics commission may stake out a position that enables a politician to take action while not necessarily following its recommendations.