Lauren Ralph, PhD, MPH
Lauren Ralph, PhD, MPH, is an Epidemiologist at UCSF’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, and Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences. Her research focuses on young people’s access to abortion and factors influencing their overall reproductive health and well-being. She is an expert on parental involvement requirements for abortion, having led novel research on the impact of these laws. She has published extensively on abortion, including the effectiveness and safety of telehealth medication abortion, accuracy of abortion patients’ self-determination of eligibility for medication abortion, pregnancy decision-making and people’s level of certainty about their pregnancy decisions, the impact of different types of abortion restrictions on people’s ability to access abortion care, and, most recently, on the frequency of abortions taking place outside the formal health care system (self-managed abortion).
Her research has been cited extensively by national media outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post, and in ongoing legal and advocacy efforts to support young people’s access to reproductive healthcare against an increasingly restricted landscape.
Dr. Ralph is a former UCSF-Kaiser BIRCWH K12 scholar and completed her PhD and MPH at the University of California, Berkeley.
For Dr. Ralph’s contact information and full list of publications, click here.