Tables provide information during a maternity fair at Womack Army Medical Center in Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sept. 20, 2025. (Dan Grubb/U.S. Army)
Researchers with Ibis Reproductive Health set out in 2024 to document how female service members were faring two years after Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that ended Constitutional protection of abortion.
More than 300 service members had participated in a similar project in 2019 by the Massachusetts-based research organization, which advocates for greater access to abortion and contraception.
This time, the research team could recruit only three women in uniform, according to a commentary published last month in the American Journal of Public Health.
“In the post-Dobbs era, there have been a lot of questions about what abortion access looks like for active-duty service members,” Catilin Gerdts, vice president for research at Ibis and a co-author of the commentary, said April 10 by phone.
“As we undertook the study, it became more and more evident that the landscape has really changed.”
That may have played a role in the dearth of participation in the study. Or it may not have.
“I can’t tell you exactly why it was so hard to recruit,” Gerdts said.
“That’s part of the challenge with not having data and not being able to document in real time people’s experiences,” she said. “But it is certainly reasonable to hypothesize that recruitment was even more challenging at this moment because abortion access in military settings is existing within an environment of heightened fear, surveillance and professional risk, especially post-Dobbs.”
About half of active-duty female service members in the continental U.S. are stationed in states with severely restricted or no abortion services, according to the commentary.
Little empirical data exists about how the Dobbs decision, which essentially left abortion regulation to states, has affected service members.
A study published early last year suggests the Supreme Court’s decision could be leading to increased numbers of female service members undergoing sterilization as a means of birth control.
The study, published in January 2025 in the journal Military Medicine, hypothesized increased rates of female sterilization at a Texas military hospital after the Dobbs decision because of that state’s near total ban on abortion.
The researchers then compared similar time periods at a military hospital in Washington state, which imposes few restrictions on abortion.
The study found that the rates of sterilization increased significantly post-Dobbs at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, while the rates at Madigan Army Medical Center in Washington remained about the same.
“We certainly know that military personnel already face huge obstacles in accessing abortion care and that the changing landscape of abortion access in America, post-Dobbs, compounds the many barriers that military personnel face in ways that would likely make abortion access even more difficult in this era,” Gerdts said.
One of the three Ibis study participants, an enlisted soldier living in a state with limited abortion exceptions, told researchers she did not seek pregnancy care at a military treatment facility in 2024 because a previous pregnancy was not kept confidential from her unit. She felt afterward that abortion was not an option, according to the commentary.
“Access to abortion and contraception is an urgent matter of policy and practice for the US military, not only because it is a matter of military readiness, retention, and morale — a chief concern for the DOD — but also because it ensures the bodily autonomy and well-being of those who serve,” the commentary concludes.
