Highlights from the 2023 Society of Family Planning Annual Meeting

Announcer:
You’re listening to SFP Action Center on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll discuss what’s to come at the 2023 Society of Family Planning Annual Meeting with Dr. Sadia Haider, who’s the Interim Chair of OB-GYN at RUSH University in Chicago and President Elect of the Society of Family Planning.

Let’s hear from Dr. Haider now.

Dr. Haider:
We’re really excited to bring everyone together after a really, uh, hard year for family planning after the Dobbs decision was made last year.  I think as people come to this meeting, there’s a really strong sense of coming together as a community.  That was a focus of the planning of the meeting.  And what I mean, specifically, is that we are bringing in all of our voices in the community who are part of the work in abortion care and family planning and contraception, specifically both clinically, but also our partners in the community who are advocates, some of our community partners that actually are on the ground helping support patients in so many other ways, and so really bringing all of those voices was really important to us in terms of planning this meeting. 

Beyond that, I think we have some really great programming around some of the cutting-edge science that has come out in the last year specific to abortion care and contraception care.  There are new guidelines that have come out in the last year, for example, self-managed abortion or self-administration of Depo-Provera, which is a contraceptive method, and then even for early pregnancy loss and pregnancy management, new recommendations as well that are highlighted in some of the new research that will be presented. 

There’s also a session planned kind of in the opening sessions around what’s called the WeCount study, which is an SFP, Society of Family Planning study, that’s been ongoing since the Dobbs decision to look at all of the changes around numbers of abortion across the United States and really looking closely at those trends across the nation as the various legislation has played out, and so there’s a lot of really interesting reporting on that. 

A couple of different studies have come out on self-managed abortion, which existed for a long time, but much more attention is being put towards it given the post-Dobbs environment they’re in.  There’s also guidelines that we’re looking at that are being presented around medication abortion.  So medication abortion is through mifepristone and misoprostol.  There’s guidelines on how that’s performed up to a certain gestational age and exploring can we go further than that.  And there’s a lot of research coming out around when patients can do this remotely through either telehealth or mail-in medication. 

I think one of the other studies that cuts across not just abortion but all pregnancy care is new guidelines that have come out based on research around Rh testing.  So Rh factor historically has been tested during pregnancy, and patients that are Rh-negative are required to get what’s called RhoGAM, a medication that we’ve given historically for decades.  And this research is showing that in early pregnancy and terminations, you don’t necessarily need to give this medication anymore, which is a huge practice change.

So, this year’s meeting really was planned in the backdrop of this evolving legal landscape and the impact on our patients but also our providers, our communities, clinical care delivery;  lawyers’ perspectives are needed; policymakers’ perspectives are needed; the advocates’ perspectives are needed; and all of that is really reflected in the content throughout. 

The other things that I think are uniquely highlighted is  not only sort of the advocacy and the legal components of the science around abortion and contraception and delivery of care but bringing in more trainees and bringing in as I said before, community partners, and so really broadening our audience a bit more too has sort of been one of our goals.  And we know that this is, I think, the largest number of people that have signed up to come to this meeting —each year it’s increased, and I think this is the highest number of attendees that are currently registered, so I think it speaks to this diversity of experience both that people bring to the meeting but that we’re representing in the content as well. 

Announcer:
That was Dr. Sadia Haider, giving us an inside look at what’s to come at the 2023 Society of Family Planning Annual Meeting. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit SFP Action Center on ReachMD dot com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!