ANSIRH research

In 2017, abortion in Chile was decriminalized. Now women can legally access abortion in cases of rape, lethal fetal anomaly, and to preserve a woman’s life.

This study is assessing whether future women’s health professionals in Chile welcome or are prepared for this legal change. A better understanding of their attitudes about and willingness to provide abortion is critical to identifying reproductive health training needs and the barriers that would need to be overcome if abortion were liberalized in Chile. 

ANSIRH’s Evaluation of Restrictions Project aims to examine the effects on women of state-level abortion restrictions and to identify strategies to mitigate the negative impacts. The project started in 2013 and has so far conducted research in ten states and evaluated the effects of a variety of restrictions. We continue to identify states and restrictions to evaluate.

Despite their enormous and trusted role in health care, nurses are often unprepared to care for the woman with an unintended pregnancy who want to seek abortion. This leads to staffing shortages that prevent women’s access to abortion care, and a lost opportunity for nurses to serve as a trusted health resource for women seeking abortion.

ANSIRH’s Primary Care Initiative (PCI) aims to expand access to early abortion care by integrating sexual and reproductive health care within primary health care. To advance this goal, PCI projects focus on translating evidence into health care practice and policy. 

The Public Health Approaches to Abortion project is a series of projects that aim to ground the public and policy debate about abortion regulation and access in scientific evidence and public health principles. Collectively, these projects serve to re-center scientific evidence and public health professional expertise in discussions of abortion patient safety and health department engagement with abortion.

Because of the provisions of the Hyde Amendment, a federal law that prohibits federal funding from being used for abortion care except in the case of rape, incest or life endangerment, the hundreds of thousands of women serving in the U.S. military face unique barriers to accessing care.

The practice of telemedicine—accessing care remotely from a doctor or nurse via phone or teleconference to address a health need—is a rapidly growing segment of the healthcare landscape.  Forbes recently called it a “game-changer for patients.”

The Turnaway Study is a prospective longitudinal study examining the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. From 2008 to 2010, we recruited from 30 abortion facilities around the country to recruit about 1,000 women who sought abortions, some who received abortions because they presented for care under the gestational limit of the clinic and some who were “turned away” and carried to term because they were past the gestational limit.