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Lori Freedman 2021 Headshot

Lori Freedman, PhD

Professor, Medical Sociologist

Lori Freedman, PhD, is a sociologist and a Greenwall Faculty Scholar 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. Dr. Freedman investigates the ways in which reproductive health care is shaped by our social structure and medical culture. Her book, Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care, is a qualitative study of the challenges to integrating abortion into physician practice. Unexpected findings from those physician interviews led her to research and write about the intersection of religion and health care, especially in the case of Catholic-owned hospitals, with an interest in how conscientious objection in medical practice operates at the institutional level. Her forthcoming book, Bishops and Bodies: Reproductive Care in American Catholic Hospitals—which reveals both how the bishops’ directives operate and how people inside Catholic hospitals navigate the resulting restrictions on medical practice—is expected to be published in July 2023. Dr. Freedman received her bachelor of arts degree at the University of Oregon and her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Davis.

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