NCYL’s new ‘Abortion Insights’ resource spotlights foster youth experiences and challenges

Reflections highlight foster youth concerns around barriers to reproductive health care, information, and safety

Insights shared by participating foster youth (not pictured) provide both validating reflections for other youth who may share similar experiences, as well as helpful guidelines for building better, more supportive systems. This is critical amid interwoven attacks on bodily autonomy, youth rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and access to healthcare. (Adobe Stock image)

By Cindy Cruz, Director of NCYL’s Reproductive Health Equity Project for Foster Youth (RHEP)

Across the U.S., young people are navigating a rapidly shifting and increasingly unequal landscape for reproductive health care.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, a young person’s right to abortion care now depends entirely on where they live. More and more, even their right to access accurate reproductive health information and education also depends on their address. Across the country, we’re seeing trends in attacks on comprehensive sexual health education (CSE), including attempts to impose anti-abortion propaganda in school curricula, promotion of “success sequencing” policies that prescribe a single traditional path to adulthood and economic stability, and expansion of measures that target discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity.

NCYL and its Reproductive Health Equity Project (RHEP) continue to fight to protect youths’ constitutional rights to receive accurate information and access to abortion. As just one recent example, NCYL submitted an amicus brief uplifting youths’ constitutional rights to information in the case of Welty V. Dunaway, which challenges the constitutionality of a Tennessee statute that seeks to prevent youth from accessing accurate information about abortion care from trusted adults.

But as has always been true, rights to information and abortion are not enough to guarantee access. Even in states where youth still have rights to sexual health information and abortion care, too many young people face barriers to enforcing their rights. Identifying and addressing these barriers is crucial.

To this end, RHEP conducted a series of focus group conversations with current and former foster youth in California to explore how young people first received information about abortion as a pregnancy option, as well as about their experiences obtaining pregnancy and abortion care. The results of those focus group conversations are reported in a new resource: “*Abortion Insights from Conversations with Youth in Foster Care*.”

The insights shared by focus group participants provide both validating reflections for other youth who may share similar experiences, as well as helpful guidelines for building better, more supportive systems for youth. This is particularly critical as attacks on bodily autonomy, youth rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and access to healthcare become increasingly interconnected.

It should seem obvious that young people deserve accurate information, confidential medical care, and the ability to make decisions about their own bodies and futures. Too often, however, foster youth are forced into systems that deny them all three.

The Abortion Insights report provides first-hand accounts from young people. Youth describe confusion about their rights, concerns about confidentiality, fear of judgment or retaliation, and difficulties accessing transportation, information, and helpful adults.

Some of the main takeaways found in the report include:

• Foster youth are more likely to first hear about abortion from the media, religious materials, or the opinions of nonsupportive adults than to learn about abortion from factual, neutral sources, such as a comprehensive sex education class. One young person said: “I felt like I never had an actual conversation about it, but when I would hear about it, it kind of had that judginess.”
• Foster youth often don’t feel supported by the adults in their lives when they become pregnant and report experiencing pressure and shaming. A youth noted: “I did it once [had an abortion] after I had my first son, and I was more pressured into it. Like from my family members and stuff like that.”
• The foster system creates unique pressures, including being seen as unfit to raise a child, financial instability, and a lack of trusted adults to equip youth with information and support. As one youth put it: “Being in care, you don’t have that support. Yes, they give you financial support, but there’s not that support of, ‘My parents can teach me how to do this or teach me how to do that.’ And I think it changes the way people see abortion, as well, for people that are in care.”

Participants’ experiences emphasize why growing efforts to restrict access to comprehensive sex education are so dangerous. The proposed policies would reduce access to critical health information, undermine inclusive learning environments, and ignore the diverse realities of young people and families. With this in context, the report concludes with a call to action and steps to promote youth access to affirming, nonjudgmental education and care.

As the report highlights, even in states where abortion is protected by law, fear and confusion have become defining features of how young people navigate abortion access. Our hope is that reflections like those shared by the young people in our Abortion Insights focus groups will lead to building systems that are more inclusive, accessible and responsive to young people’s realities.

Young people know what they need. They deserve policies that recognize those needs.

Cindy Cruz is Director of NCYL’s Reproductive Health Equity Project for Foster Youth (RHEP).