Joseph E. Potter

Joseph Potter's interests lie in the areas of reproductive health, population and development, and demographic estimation.  Since the Fall of 2011, he has been leading a project to evaluate the impact of legislation affecting reproductive health enacted during the 2011 Texas Legislative Session.  Provisions in the state budget bill cut support for family planning by two-thirds, and a budget rider placed restrictions on the reauthorization of Texas’ Medicaid waiver program (The Women’s Health Program) that are not acceptable to the federal government.  Finally, changes were also made in access to abortion by way of HB 15, commonly known as “the sonogram bill.”  This three year project--The Texas Policy Evaluation Project or Tx-PEP--involves collaborators at Ibis Reproductive Health, the University of Alabama-Birmingham, and will focus especially on the health of low-income and minority women in Texas. 

Through 2011, Potter was Principal Investigator of the Border Contraceptive Access Study (BCAS), a project on oral contraceptive use along the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas.   BCAS was a seven-year collaborative investigation with the University of Texas at El Paso and Ibis Reproductive Health funded by NICHD (R01HD047816).  Data were collected between September 2006 and December 2008, and now available for distribution through ICPSR.  

Since 2008, Potter’s publications have appeared in Population and Development Review, Demography, the American Journal of Public Health, Contraception, Obstetrics & Gynecology, the New England Journal of Medicine, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Population Studies, Population Research and Policy Review, Birth, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos, Redes, the Revista Latinoamericana de Población, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, and the Revista Brasileira de Estudos de População.