ABORTION CARE TODAY
Stories of Reproductive Health Care Post-Roe
Audio Archive: Featured Clips
Quick Look:
What Our Providers Say
Dr. Beverly Gray
Why are we forced by these laws to wait, when we know that intervening could save this patient’s life?
DR. DAWN BINGHAM
People want to medically take care of patients. This new current ban in place criminalizes evidence-based medicine.
DR. MISHA PANGASA
Pregnancy is beautiful sometimes, and really terrible sometimes…pregnancy and childbirth are not neutral. To be able to sit with someone and say “You get to decide how you want this to go,” feels like such an important thing. It’s why so many of us give so much of ourselves to this work.
preliminary findings
Who we are
We are an interdisciplinary research team housed at Duke University, working through Bass Connections and Abortion Care Today. Our team brings together a diverse group of undergraduate students, faculty, clinicians, legal scholars, and community partners to study the real-time consequences of abortion policy change in the United States, with a particular focus on the post-Dobbs South. Since January 2023, our work has centered on documenting how the overturning of Roe v. Wade has reshaped the practice of reproductive health care—especially for OBGYNs and abortion providers operating under rapidly shifting and often ambiguous legal regimes.
As of 2026, we have conducted over 100 interviews with providers from over 30 states, and are always adding more to our archive.
Our team is informed by Sister Song’s reproductive justice framework, but we acknowledge that we ourselves cannot operate from this lens, because our leadership is mainly composed of white individuals. We acknowledge that our team cannot fully understand the lived experiences of People of Color while studying the effects of reproductive healthcare restrictions, and seek to highlight and uplift the work of Reproductive Justice advocates.
Through our work, our team is dedicated to documenting the ways that abortion care bans are impacting the reproductive care that providers can offer patients. While most of our early interviews are with physicians, we will expand in coming years to include midwives, nurses, doulas, and clinic staff. We are also determined to learn where the medical system is missing the mark, and how patient stories can push clinicians to be better. We invite everyone who comes to our site to visit We Testify, Advocates for Youth, and Abortion Diary to hear these stories first hand. We understand patient and provider storytelling as key tools that humanize everyone in the reproductive care ecosystem. We hope the provider stories on our site can help the everyday person understand the abortion ban landscape, so everyone has the information they need to push for a better environment for reproductive health care and reproductive justice for all.
What we do
Interview Team
We interview reproductive health care providers in restricted/ban states as well as access states. We transcribe, index, and clip excerpts to make available to public. We are building and preserving an archive of how post-Roe state laws impact the reproductive health care that providers can offer or not offer patients.
Media Team
Our goal is to strengthen connections with journalists, influencers, and other media professionals to inform them on how to write more effectively about abortion policy and laws.
Map Team
Our goal is to create an interactive map that highlights the context that our health care providers come from.
Medical Students for Choice Team
Our goal is to support Medical Students for Choice chapters through the creation of educational material based on our research.
our team objectives
The project is guided by five central objectives:
- Document in real time how abortion restrictions affect reproductive health care providers’ ability to practice evidence-based medicine
- Preserve provider testimony through rigorous oral-history methods, ensuring these accounts are not lost amid rapid legal change
- Analyze downstream consequences for reproductive care, family health, medical training, and workforce sustainability
- Produce accessible research outputs that inform public understanding, policy debates, and future legal and medical scholarship
- Train students not only in research methods, but also in ethical interviewing, collaborative knowledge production, and responsible public scholarship
why it matters
Much public discussion of post-Dobbs America focuses on patients or electoral politics. Far less attention is paid to the medical professionals caught between legal mandates and clinical ethics. This gap matters.
Abortion restrictions do not merely limit access to specific procedures—they restructure how medicine is practiced, how risk is assessed, and how providers understand their professional obligations. These changes have consequences for:
- Patient safety and quality of care, especially in emergency and high-risk pregnancy contexts
- Provider burnout, moral distress, and workforce attrition, particularly in restrictive states
- Medical education and training, as future clinicians face narrowing clinical exposure
- Health equity, as restrictions disproportionately affect marginalized communities ethics.
By centering provider experiences and grounding them in legal and ethical analysis, this project generates evidence that is essential for informed policy making, accurate media coverage, and long-term accountability.
