Volume 524 - Citizen Science for Health 2025 (CS4Health2025) - Global Health - Oral Presentation
Amplifying Women’s Voices Through Citizen Science
Y. Golumbic* and Y.B. Ben-David
*: corresponding author
Full text: pdf
Published on: June 30, 2026
Abstract
Fertility care represents a critical area where systemic inequities intersect with deeply personal experiences. While access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) is shaped by geography, socioeconomic status, and cultural norms, even women with full access to care often report feelings of isolation and a lack of agency. The “true costs” of ART, including extensive physical, emotional, and financial burdens, are often overlooked by the biomedical goal of conception. In this paper, we argue for a shift toward the everyday realities of navigating fertility care, situating women not merely as patients but as central actors in shaping and interpreting their reproductive journeys. We propose a novel citizen science approach, structured around three dimensions – 1. lived physical experiences, 2. emotional experiences, and 3. women’s recommendations, to uncover inequities and better understand how fertility care systems function in practice. This framework provides a systematic yet holistic understanding of access and experience, while generating actionable insights. This approach aims to democratize reproductive health knowledge, amplify women’s voices, and inform more inclusive policies, while offering a transferable model for public engagement in addressing public health challenges where personal experience and systemic inequities intersect.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.524.0028
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in article format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in proceeding format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.