Recruiting active-duty service members to talk about abortion access has become nearly impossible, researchers say, and the silence is costing them data they need to help that population.
In a six-month window in 2024, researcher Caitlin Gerdts and her team could find only three service members willing to participate in a study on abortion access, even with guaranteed anonymity. That’s compared to 323 participants in a similar study published in 2019. The gap was too wide to produce publishable research, so the team released an analytical essay instead.
Three people. That’s what the research environment has come to.
“It makes sense that this is a particularly difficult moment,” said Gerdts, vice president for research at the international nonprofit Ibis Reproductive Health.
Gerdts told Michigan Advance that the collapse in recruitment didn’t happen in isolation. Researchers point to a combination of factors: state-level abortion bans creating legal anxiety, shifting Department of Defense policies under current leadership, and a pre-existing culture of silence inside the military that long predates the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning federal abortion protections.
The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Who’s affected and where
The scale of the problem matters here. As of 2021, more than 230,000 women served in active-duty roles across all branches, according to U.S. Department of Defense data, and 95% of them are between 18 and 44, which puts them squarely in reproductive age. The RAND Corporation found in 2022 that roughly 40% of women on active duty are stationed in states with severely restricted or no abortion access, including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Those states carry some of the largest military installations in the country.
That geographic reality means service members don’t get to vote with their feet. A civilian in Atlanta can drive to Virginia or take a long weekend. A soldier at Fort Bragg or Fort Bliss can’t simply leave post, and many don’t have the leave days or money to travel across state lines for healthcare.
Why the silence is spreading
Researchers who work with civilian patients told the same journalists they haven’t run into the same recruitment wall that Gerdts described. Organizations including Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco said they haven’t experienced the same drop-off. That gap suggests the problem isn’t about abortion research broadly. It’s about the military specifically.
Kristen Jozkowski, senior scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, said the data shortage has direct consequences for service members’ health.
“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 help them.
The military’s existing culture around reproductive health was already a barrier before the legal landscape shifted. Service members have historically been reluctant to disclose healthcare decisions that could affect their careers or their unit relationships. Add to that the current political environment inside the Pentagon, state laws that could theoretically expose someone to legal jeopardy, and general uncertainty about what the Department of Defense will or won’t protect, and you get a population that goes quiet.
What researchers can’t measure, they can’t fix
Caitlin Russell, a veteran who served on the cultural support team in Afghanistan during two deployments, has spoken publicly about these issues, representing what many active-duty members won’t. Her willingness to speak out is the exception, not the rule.
Research on abortion access typically focuses on providers because providers are easier to recruit than patients. But provider-side data can’t capture what happens inside a service member’s decisionmaking when she’s stationed in a state with a six-week ban, can’t easily take leave, and doesn’t know whether her command will find out if she seeks care.
Without that data, policymakers designing healthcare policy for active-duty women are working with a significant gap. The 40% figure from RAND showing how many women are stationed in restrictive states hasn’t gotten smaller since 2022. It’s likely grown, given the pace of state-level abortion legislation since then.
Gerdts and her colleagues published the analytical essay in place of the study they couldn’t complete. It’s a record of what they weren’t able to find out, which in its own way tells a story about how deep the silence has gotten and what it’s going to take to break through it.
