Enlarge / A woman holds a positive pregnancy test in her hands. (credit: Getty | picture alliance)

A year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, clinical researchers are still grappling with how to ethically adjust to the new reality—which at this point involves abortion bans and restrictions in roughly half of US states.

In a policy forum piece published Thursday in Science, a group of health experts and bioethicists led by Jeremy Sugarman at Johns Hopkins University lays out the ethical, legal, and practical challenges researchers face in the new era.

Bans and restrictions lead to “increased maternal morbidity and mortality and deepening socioeconomic and racial inequities,” they wrote, but also “pose risks to clinical research participants and potentially compromise the scientific and social value of some research.”