Researchers studying abortion access among active-duty military personnel can’t get people to talk. Not won’t. Can’t.
In a six-month stretch during 2024, Caitlin Gerdts and her team at Ibis Reproductive Health recruited exactly three service members willing to participate in a study on abortion access, even with guaranteed anonymity. Three. Back in 2019, a comparable study pulled 323 participants. That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse so severe the team couldn’t produce publishable research and had to release an analytical essay instead.
“It makes sense that this is a particularly difficult moment,” said Gerdts, who serves as vice president for research at the international nonprofit.
The silence didn’t come from nowhere. Gerdts told Michigan Advance that several forces converged: state abortion bans ratcheting up legal anxiety among service members, Department of Defense policy shifts under current leadership, and a culture inside the military that was already quiet on reproductive health long before the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision erased federal abortion protections. None of those things alone would’ve done it. Together, they’ve made recruitment close to impossible.
The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
The numbers behind the silence are worth sitting with. As of 2021, more than 230,000 women were serving in active-duty roles across all military branches, according to U.S. Department of Defense data. Among those women, 95% fall between the ages of 18 and 44. That’s nearly the entire female active-duty force inside reproductive age. The RAND Corporation reported in 2022 that roughly 40% of women on active duty are stationed in states with severely restricted or banned abortion access, specifically Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Those four states don’t just have restrictive laws. They’re home to some of the biggest military installations anywhere in the country.
The geography locks people in. A civilian living in Atlanta who needs abortion care can drive to Virginia, take a few days off, make arrangements. A soldier stationed at Fort Bragg or Fort Bliss doesn’t have that option. They can’t leave post without authorization, they don’t always have leave days to burn, and traveling across state lines for healthcare costs money most junior enlisted service members don’t have sitting around.
That’s the practical reality that researchers say isn’t getting enough attention, partly because they can’t get the data to document it properly.
Civilian-focused researchers haven’t run into the same wall. Organizations studying reproductive health outside military contexts, including those at major research universities, haven’t reported the same drop-off in participant recruitment that Gerdts described. That distinction matters. It tells you the problem isn’t with abortion research as a category. It’s specific to the military population.
Kristen Jozkowski, senior scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, put it plainly. “As a researcher and behavioral scientist, I think it is an issue when we cannot get access to any population, particularly ones who may be unique or at increased risk of something,” Jozkowski said. “It limits our ability” to understand what service members actually need and whether they’re getting it.
That phrase, “it limits our ability,” is doing a lot of work. Without participants, there’s no data. Without data, there’s no evidence base. Without an evidence base, policy arguments about what the Department of Defense should or shouldn’t do for service members seeking reproductive care become harder to win, and easier to ignore.
The 2022 Supreme Court decision didn’t create this problem from scratch. Researchers who study the military’s culture around reproductive health have pointed out for years that abortion was already a topic service members avoided discussing, even before it became a legal minefield in roughly half the states where they’re stationed. What changed after 2022 is that the legal risk became real enough to make silence feel like self-protection.
By 2026, that silence has become so thick that a research team with full anonymity protections in place can spend six months and come away with three participants. That’s not a data gap. That’s a wall.
