This year, the Guttmacher Institute is turning 50—that’s half a century of advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights! To celebrate, we’re reflecting on some of our most important data in the video below and revisiting our history in our 50 Years of Impact timeline. We encourage you to watch the video and explore the timeline for snapshots of our work and impact.
Throughout the last five decades, Guttmacher has been a catalyst for positive change in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States and globally. Here are just a few examples of our work over that time:
- Provided critical data to support the creation of Title X, the U.S. national family planning program.
- Spurred the development of adolescent pregnancy prevention programs.
- Prompted state laws ensuring minors’ access to confidential reproductive health care.
- Contributed to the spread of state-level comprehensive sex education programs.
- Promoted the issue of fully funded insurance coverage for contraceptives.
- Provided the evidence base for the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage guarantee.
- Mobilized billions of dollars in global aid to support contraceptive services in the world’s poorest countries.
- Prompted many countries to liberalize their abortion laws and make safe abortion services more widely available by documenting the impact of unsafe abortion around the world.
- Enabled countless organizations and government agencies to understand where reproductive health services are most needed and the impact of meeting those needs, contributing to the development of innumerable programs and interventions, both domestically and internationally.
- Informed the clinical care provided by thousands of health care providers in the United States and around the world by documenting contraceptive failure rates and other clinically relevant data.
For a more in-depth historical look, you can find a complete collection of the Institute’s work in the Sophia Smith Archive at Smith College.
We publish two peer-reviewed journals, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health and International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health—the former of which is celebrating its 50th year of publication—as well as the Guttmacher Policy Review and a broad range of reports and other resources that have provided the evidence base to promote effective and evidence-driven policies and programs around the world. In addition, our research has been published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals, including such well-regarded and influential publications as The Lancet, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Adolescent Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, Demography, Lancet Global Health, Studies in Family Planning, Population and Development Review, Health Policy and Planning, BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, and New England Journal of Medicine.
We hope you'll join us in celebrating Guttmacher’s rich history as we work together for a better future.
