Lori Freedman, PhD

Lori Freedman, PhD, is a sociologist and bioethicist who conducts primarily qualitative research about how the politics of abortion shape obstetric and reproductive medical care in the United States. Her research currently focuses on how clinicians understand and implement state abortion bans in emergency medicine, ob-gyn and high-risk obstetric practice. Her 2010 book, Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care, is a qualitative study about physician practice at a time when abortion training had expanded throughout the U.S., but the number of clinicians providing had not.  Her 2023 book, Bishops and Bodies: Reproductive Care in American Catholic Hospitals, is a synthesis of over 10 years her research at the intersection of religious institutional power and health care. It reveals how the bishops’ policies restrict standard reproductive care, how clinicians inside Catholic hospitals navigate around those restrictions, and how patients experience them. In 2024, Bishops and Bodies won the Donald W. Light Award for Applied Medical Sociology from the American Sociological Association.  Dr. Freedman is a full professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. She conducts research with Advancing New Standards In Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), a program of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at UCSF.  She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Davis and is a Greenwall Faculty Scholar alum.

For a full list of Dr. Freedman's publications, awards, and presentations, click here.