Joseph E. Potter
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About Joseph
Potter’s interests surround the areas of reproductive health, population and development, and demographic estimation. Since the Fall of 2011, he as been leading an eight-year project—The Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP)—to evaluate the impact of legislation enacted by the Texas Legislature affecting both funding for family planning and access to abortion care. Earlier, Potter was Principle Investigator of the Border Contraceptive Access Study (BCAS), an NICHD funded project on oral contraceptive use along the US-Mexico border in El-Paso, Texas.
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Assesses women's preferences for contraception after delivery and compares use with preferences.
Finds that women completing schooling in Mexico had higher rates of overall breastfeeding throughout the study period than women educated in the United States, regardless of country of birth, and that women born in Mexico who completed their schooling in the United States were least likely to exclusively breastfeed.
Finds that, following the 2013 Texas House Bill 2, one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, the number of Texas facilities providing abortions declined from 41 in 2012 to 17 in June 2016.
Assesses women’s knowledge of specific abortion restrictions in Texas and reasons for supporting these laws.
Assesses women’s experiences obtaining affordable family planning services in the wake of substantial budget cuts to state family planning programs.
Assesses pregnancies that could have been averted through improved access to contraceptive methods in the two years after delivery.
Assesses male partners’ perceived willingness to undergo vasectomy through surveys with 470 Mexican-origin women who did not want more children in El Paso, Texas.
Evaluates the effect of legislation in Texas that dramatically cut and restricted participation in the state’s family planning program in 2011. Finds that 25% of family planning clinics in Texas closed, organizations served 54% fewer clients, and long-acting reversible contraception was less widely available.
Assesses motivations for oral contraceptive users living in El Paso, Texas for patronizing a U.S. clinic or a Mexican pharmacy with over-the-counter pills, and to determine which women were likely to use the over-the-counter option.