The role of advanced practice clinicians in providing abortion care in the US
Abortion
Awarded 2025
Documenting the composition of clinicians providing abortion care
Isaac Maddow-Zimet, MS
Guttmacher Institute
$75,000

Advanced practice clinicians (APCs), including nurse practitioners, midwives, and physician associates, play an important but often unrecognized role in the provision of clinician-provided abortion care in the United States. The most recent quantitative national data on the volume of abortion care provided by APCs is from 2014, which indicate that APCs provided at least some abortion care in 40% of abortion clinics that year. In the decade since, policy changes at the state and federal level have potentially expanded APCs’ role in providing abortion care, during a time of rapid change in the broader abortion provision landscape. We propose to leverage an existing, ongoing data collection infrastructure—Guttmacher Institute’s Monthly Abortion Provision Study—to produce nationally representative estimates of the volume and share of abortions provided by APCs in 2025. Gathering new data on provision of care by APCs will allow for estimates of the share and type of facilities that rely on APCs for abortion provision, and on variation in APC provision by facility characteristics. Via rapid reporting on Guttmacher’s website and a research article submitted for peer review, this study will provide the first representative estimates of the number of APC-provided abortions in the US and offer important comparisons in the share of facilities utilizing APCs for abortion care over time. These data will be essential to advancing policy changes to broaden the role of APCs in states with restrictions still in place, as well as illuminating gaps in and opportunities to expand care provision.