The future of federal abortion data collection is unclear

This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. Meet Chabeli and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

A government watchdog says it’s unclear when — or even whether — we’ll know going forward how the end of national abortion protections impact Americans’ health outcomes, livelihoods and financial futures as the federal government turns away from abortion data collection indefinitely.  

A report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office and first shared exclusively with The 19th analyzed the existing data on the economic impact of abortion bans and found that government tracking has been very limited — and could become more so due to changes made by the Trump administration. 

The last federal data on the impact of abortion bans ends in 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned. That data is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been collecting data on the number of abortions and the demographics of those who obtain them in its Abortion Surveillance report for almost six decades. Since publishing the 2022 data in November (data is typically released on a two-year delay), it’s unclear whether the agency plans to continue the research. Though the CDC’s survey is voluntary and limited in scope — some states, including California, for example, don’t provide information — the report was one of the most reliable sources of government abortion data. 

Without it, there is no detailed federal data on what has happened since Roe was overturned. Tuesday marks three years since the landmark Supreme Court case was reversed in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

“According to Department of Health and Human Services officials we spoke to in May 2025, the agency, which includes CDC, is undergoing a realignment,” the nonpartisan GAO, which provides independent research for Congress and executive agencies, wrote in its report. “Officials were uncertain whether the resulting changes at the agency would affect future data collection efforts, including data on abortions.”

For its analysis, GAO contacted seven federal agencies to ask what efforts they were undertaking to assess the economic effects of state abortion restrictions. Only the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Chief Actuary said it planned to consider the economic impact of abortion restrictions in some of its upcoming work. The agency uses CDC data to make predictions about birth rates and whether any impact from abortion bans could affect the broader economy and the size of the labor force. 

But the agency told GAO it will require three years of abortion data since Roe v. Wade was overturned to be able to come to any conclusion and, even then, the data over that period is so limited it may be too insufficient to be reliable. 

All of it hinges on whether the CDC continues to collect state abortion data at all. The CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Already, the Trump administration has moved to eliminate research on abortion. In January, Trump issued an executive order blocking data collection measuring the effect of access to reproductive care, including abortion care. The administration scrubbed several references to abortion on the Department of Health and Human Services’ website. 

That data could potentially illuminate for lawmakers the myriad effects abortion restrictions can have. Beyond the health consequences, lack of abortion access can destabilize people economically, affecting everything from where they choose to live to whether they can stay employed. 

“Not only does the new report show impacts of these harmful bans in stark terms, it also raises red flags about the government’s ability to collect important economic data due to the Trump Administration’s attacks on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia, in a statement to The 19th. The investigation into the data was requested by Scott and Sen. Richard Blumental, a New York Democrat.   

For its report released Monday, GAO had to instead turn to 55 rigorously researched studies conducted over the past seven years, including from the Guttmacher Institute and research published in peer-reviewed medical journals such as JAMA and the American Journal of Public Health. GAO also spoke with four academic researchers and three national organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. 

Blumental called the report “irrefutable” evidence of the impact the Dobbs ruling has on the financial stability of women. 

“There’s a proven connection between slashed reproductive freedoms and devastating financial distress. Unsafe and unintended pregnancies have huge costs — in lives and dollars — impacting all of us,” Blumental said in a statement to The 19th. “This fact-based document is a searing indictment of Dobbs on its third anniversary.”

According to the research, getting an abortion has become more expensive since some states banned the procedure, requiring patients to often take time off work to travel to a state with abortion access, plus the cost of that travel, the care itself and any child care expenses. It amounts to a “significant expense for low-income families,” GAO found. 

One 2021 study out of Tennessee showed that even the introduction of a mandatory, 48-hour waiting period in 2015 that required two visits to get an abortion caused the average cost to rise by several hundred dollars. 

Abortion access also impacts other decisions people make around where to live and whether they get an education. One 2023 study that GAO highlighted found that working women with at least a bachelor’s degree were more than 7 percent more likely to move to a state without restrictions than one with it. Another post-Roe study found that Black women living in states with abortion restrictions as teenagers were less likely than Black women in other states to enter college and complete it.

People who are unable to get an abortion then face worse financial outcomes in the months and years that follow. GAO cites findings from the Turnaway Study, a massive abortion research project that followed 1,000 women over 10 years studying the ways that being denied an abortion reshaped their lives.

Historically, about half of people who seek abortions live in poverty, and economic stability is one of the top reasons they seek an abortion in the first place. Many cite concerns around caring for the children they already have.

The United States’ lacks a strong social safety net for parents — those on food assistance programs can’t use the funds they receive to buy diapers, for instance; mothers on the federal assistance program for low-income women and children are deeply restricted in what formula they can buy with government assistance; and child care across the country is now costlier than in-state tuition in 41 states. For a single parent, child care costs swallow a third of their income on average (and in some states as much as half). 

The Turnaway Study found that women who were denied care fell deeper into poverty and took four years to catch up to the employment levels of the women in the study who did receive an abortion. GAO’s analysis of the existing data also found that women who were denied care were less likely to be working full-time six months after the denial. 

Diana Greene Foster, the author of the Turnaway Study and a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, was hoping to continue her work by following people who sought abortions after the overturn of Roe. 

But Foster was only six months into a five-year federal grant to fund the study when federal funding was terminated in March. 

In a letter from the National Institutes of Health that Foster shared with The 19th at the time, she was told her research no longer aligned with agency priorities: “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.