Exploring How Women Navigate Sexual and Reproductive Health Decision-Making While Experiencing Homelessness

There is a stark knowledge gap on the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of women experiencing homelessness. The limited research that does exists foregrounds the challenges that they face at every stage of their reproductive lives.

This presentation outlines findings from doctoral research undertaken in England and Australia, which adopts a qualitative design incorporating interviews and collaging sessions with women who have experienced homelessness to explore how they negotiate and experience SRH decision-making. A theoretical lens combining concepts of reproductive justice, structural violence, and stigma informs the study. Findings suggest that contrary to pathologising representations of women as irresponsible, immoral, and unable to make choices about their SRH, women are, in fact, continuously undertaking invisible labour to make difficult decisions in extremely restricted contexts. Despite differences in geopolitical contexts and lived experiences, overarching themes of the loss of support structures, restricting expectations of femininity, the denial of maternal identity, and institutional and interpersonal violence feature across their narratives.

By centring the structural conditions that shape the SRH decision-making of women experiencing homelessness, this research offers a novel and nuanced understanding of their reproductive lives. It examines reproductive rights not in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to the structures that shape the lives of women, and in turn reveals the invisible forces that constrain their decision-making processes.