Dr Laura Sochas has been awarded funding by the Leverhulme Trust for a pioneering new research project.
The project entitled Policing Reproduction via Migration and Family Policies: Stress, Stigma & Health adds to Dr Sochas’ impressive portfolio of research work focusing on how power, institutions and social policies affect health inequalities.
The Leverhulme Early Career Fellow said, “I’m delighted to be funded by the Leverhulme Trust to carry out this research. I will be exploring how family and migration policies in Europe affect parents’ rights to have children and to parent with dignity, and whether this affects their health.“
A woman's “right to choose” is a well-established principle among mainstream reproductive rights movements, yet reproductive justice scholars have criticised this framing for failing to include the right to have children and to parent with dignity. Migration and family policies can severely limit these rights for poor and/or migrant families, but the health consequences of doing so are unknown.
Dr Sochas’ project aims to set up systems to monitor how family and migration policies affect these rights across Europe. It will deliver major innovations in the quantitative measurement and analysis of reproductive justice and evaluate the health consequences of limiting these reproductive freedoms.
Dr Sochas obtained her PhD in Demography from the Department of Social Policy at LSE in 2020 and also holds an MSc in Social Research Methods, a Master’s in Public Administration, and a BA in PPE from the University of Oxford. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a consultant on public health programmes in African and South Asian countries, for clients such as UKAID, the Gates Foundation, WHO and UNFPA. She has recently had a paper published entitled Does Collective Bargaining Reduce Health Inequalities between Labour Market Insiders and Outsiders? (Socio-Economic Review, 00, 1–36. Sochas, L. and Reeves, A. (2022). Read more here.
