Session: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Justice Among Youth in Foster Care (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Youth with histories of foster care experience disproportionate risk of poor sexual and reproductive health outcomes as they transition into adulthood due to myriad challenges at individual, family, community, and system levels. Aligned with the conference theme of decolonizing research using an anti-oppression lens, this symposium employs a reproductive justice framework. Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework asserting the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have or not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. To this end, our symposium group will share five presentations using a range of innovative methods to assess the experiences of foster youth and related strategies for supporting their sexual and reproductive health in adolescence and early adulthood. The symposium will begin with a quantitative study on changing rates of childbirth and related racial and ethnic disparities in childbirth among youth in and transitioning from foster care across waves of data collection of the National Youth in Transition Database. The second symposium presentation will describe results from an exploratory examination of the statewide documentation of mothers in foster care in California since the adoption of the federal requirement to document parents in 2014. Next, we will hear results from two qualitative studies centering the voices and lived experience of LGBTQ+ youth in foster care regarding their intertwined sexual and reproductive health and mental health needs: One study will focus on using SAMHSA's trauma-informed care framework to assess these needs, and the other will examine how intersecting systems of oppression impact these needs and how they are being addressed. Our symposium will close with a fifth presentation sharing results from a mixed-method formative evaluation assessing the feasibility, acceptability, and appropriateness of Brave Conversations, an intervention to train foster caregivers, child welfare professionals, and other supportive adults on addressing sexual health among foster youth. Symposium attendees will leave having learned the latest research on addressing sexual and reproductive health among youth in foster care, grounded in a reproductive justice framework. This symposium seeks to build the research evidence base about disparities in adolescent and young adult health outcomes, sharing our efforts to engage and uplift community voices to gain a deeper understanding of root causes, sexual and reproductive health needs, and promising interventions.