Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Becky Staiger
Social Sciences; Public Policy; Public Affairs
School of Public Health
UC Berkeley
How Do State Abortion Policies Affect the Abortion-Care Workforce and Patient Outcomes?
The delivery of abortion care in the US is undergoing rapid change. In recent years, states have enacted policies that alternately restrict and expand clinicians’ ability to provide abortion and related care. Restrictive laws—including abortion bans and Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws—limit where and by whom abortions can be performed, while expansive policies—such as scope-of-practice (SOP) reforms and “shield” laws—authorize advanced practice clinicians to provide abortion care and protect providers from out-of-state prosecution. These countervailing trends have major implications for both patients and the clinicians who deliver their care, yet systematic evidence on workforce responses is lacking. This project explores how the abortion-care workforce responds to policies governing their ability to provide abortions and other reproductive healthcare. We will first build a comprehensive, longitudinal database of the clinician workforce delivering care in all abortion-providing facilities in the US from 2017 to present. Aim 1 will describe the demographic, specialty, and training composition of clinicians providing abortions. Aim 2 will quantify how practice-expanding and practice-restricting policies affect workforce entry, exit, and location decisions. Aim 3 will merge these data with Medicaid claims to assess how policy-driven workforce changes influence access to reproductive and primary care and related health outcomes among marginalized populations. Findings will create a new empirical foundation for understanding the abortion-care workforce and advance my broader research agenda on how policy environments shape healthcare provider behavior.
