One Institute, Indivisible

Guttmacher: You built the current strategic plan across divisions. What did that look like behind the scenes?

Kelly: We organized working groups around the plan’s five priorities: disrupting misinformation and disinformation, advancing global work through equitable partnerships, strengthening state capacity at home, deepening reach through digital innovation and improving internal processes. Each working group was deeply cross-divisional, intentionally bringing together staff from research, policy and communications, as well as finance and operations. It created new constellations of people who don’t usually get to work together at a strategic level, and some of our best, thorniest conversations came from just bringing them together in one room.

Oni: The other piece was listening. We asked partners and donors, some who know us well, some who’d bring an outside eye, where our real value is. What came back validated us as a truly global organization. We aren’t siloed into separate domestic and international teams that never interact. Instead, we are one unified organization where global and domestic experts actively collaborate, bridging research, policy and communications. A three-legged stool.

Guttmacher: How does Guttmacher use research findings for advocacy? How do you plan to better integrate the Institute’s programmatic functions?

Blair: Take our new Online Medication Abortion Study, which includes patients accessing telehealth under the protection of shield laws. From the very start, our experts across the programmatic divisions work together to conceptualize the study questions, and our teams have stayed in constant touch throughout fielding the survey, analyzing the data and drafting journal articles. This approach ensures seamless integration between research, policy and communications and allows us to account for diverse perspectives and avoid blind spots—all with the goal of generating maximum external impact. Moving forward, we will lean further into this integrated approach.

Kelly: And we approach these meetings asking what research findings are going to resonate most with a member of Congress or other lawmakers right now, especially with the ongoing threats to mifepristone and telemedicine. Legislators don’t have time for a 10-page paper. We’re lucky if they read a one-page memo. So, we preview findings with partners on the ground and then turn the science into something an ally on the Hill or in a statehouse can use.

Guttmacher: Policy moves fast, but rigorous research takes time. How do you balance the need for rapid-response data with long-term strategy?

Blair: That timeline difference is an inherent challenge in our work. Some of our research is reactive to the policy environment, for example documenting people having to travel for care due to abortion bans. But we also have to build evidence for the world we want to live in. Sometimes you build a foundational body of work and six years later it gets picked up to push a major policy forward.

Kelly: What makes Guttmacher so powerful is that our data serves as the scaffolding for the entire movement. But to make that advocacy land, we rely on deep internal partnerships. My team will sit with Blair’s team, for example, and say, “My takeaway from your data calls for policies A, B and C. Is that accurate? How far can we go with our calls to action based on this evidence?”

Guttmacher: Is there a win for the sexual and reproductive health and rights movement you can cite that captures that long game?

Blair: Guttmacher data has genuinely shifted the conversation. The fact that almost everyone can rattle off our Abortion Patient Survey finding that one in four women in America will have an abortion in her lifetime—that has normalized abortion as a common reproductive experience. That isn’t a win overnight. The positions of US politicians still don’t match public support for abortion rights, but our data helps ground the support that will eventually translate into policy.

Kelly: The same is true of our figure that at least 64% of abortions are now medication abortion. It’s cited practically every week, and it’s made clear that the attacks on medication abortion are just the next front in the post-Dobbs strategy.

Guttmacher: How does Guttmacher drive impact globally without having physical field offices abroad?

Oni: We can’t do it alone, and we don’t try. We work through long-standing local partners in lower income countries, and often they come to us with requests like, “This bill can protect access to reproductive health care, but it’s stuck in parliament. Can you help us build evidence to support it?” Those are the most effective pathways, because local advocates know exactly what evidence they need for their people.

The clearest recent win was in Rwanda, which was due not only to Guttmacher, but the result of years of collective effort by many people across the movement. Advocates were pushing to pass a bill expanding SRH access for adolescents starting at age 16. When it faced opposition from socially conservative members of parliament, partners reached out, and we compiled evidence on the SRH needs of adolescents and the adverse health outcomes that could be averted if they could access comprehensive SRH care. The lawmakers looked at the data and concluded that—because unintended pregnancies were so high, the risk to adolescent girls and young women was so high and the benefits of expanding access to care were substantial—they were comfortable passing one holistic health bill that included SRH care. Without those advocates on the ground requesting and leveraging the evidence, it wouldn’t have happened.

Guttmacher: The consequences of US policy extend far beyond our borders. How are the recent cuts to US foreign aid impacting reproductive health access globally?

Oni: The US built much of the global health order after World War II, fostered norms of multilateral solidarity and helped move beyond tropical medicine and colonial health to a more equitable approach of health for all. So, when the US pulls back, it isn’t only money that vanishes. It’s a whole culture of cooperation. And the pressure this places on other governmental donors compromises development assistance more broadly. Our partners are already reporting rebounding HIV epidemics, infants and children losing access to HIV medication, and essential services shuttered by the loss of USAID. And the “aid” that remains now falls under the “America First strategy.” What used to be framed as global development is now negotiated through bilateral agreements predicated on serving America’s own interests, with family planning stripped out and anything touching comprehensive sexuality education or gender eliminated—in countries with insufficient internal budgets to fill the gap.

Guttmacher: What is the US movement learning from countries that have successfully changed hearts and minds to reverse regressive SRHR laws?

Blair: The case of Mexico is instructive. Starting in 2020, before the courts opened the door to decriminalizing abortion, the federal Ministry of Health worked to get uterine evacuation services running in all 32 states. Rather than waiting for the laws to change explicitly to allow abortion services, they framed it as basic quality of care for miscarriage, post-abortion care or induced abortion. US providers in restrictive states are arriving at that logic now by necessity. The strategy the US movement can adopt is to advocate for uterine evacuation as a basic health service regardless of abortion laws. By framing it as holistic, essential care for anyone managing a miscarriage or seeking post-abortion care, advocates can ensure the health system is still equipped to respond to people’s needs even in restrictive settings.

Kelly: The Marea Verde/Green Wave is this massive grassroots movement that has successfully fought to decriminalize and expand abortion rights across Latin American countries like Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. When I think of it, I think of joy, resistance, long-term vision and people power. In the United States, we’ve become a movement funneled through nonprofits, and that’s not what a movement is. A movement is people, and it requires not being afraid to surface and work through tensions and disagreements. That’s the lesson we keep having to relearn.

Guttmacher: How are you making sure Guttmacher’s global partners have what they need to fight their own fights?

Oni: We are aggressively democratizing access to our flagship data products via digital dashboards like Adding It Up, so partners don’t have to wait for us to respond to them. My biggest dream is that partners across the movement have the exact tools, indicators and evidence they need to fight for the rights of their people.

Guttmacher: Three years out, with your teams working in tight alignment, what can Guttmacher do that it couldn’t before?

Blair: What we’re leaning into with our strategic plan isn’t new. Integrating across our programmatic expertise has always been our strength. It’s about making it the norm with all of us in lockstep from a project’s inception.

Oni: It’s partners feeling genuinely empowered, that together we’ve built what our movement needs to expand SRHR for everyone everywhere. With research funding so tight right now, that means getting creative to map new data sources and build robust indicators that are meaningful to the people doing the work on the ground to drive real change. We cannot have the research disrupted or sitting in an ivory tower because we have no funding to get it out there.

Kelly: And meeting people where they are. Folks get their information completely differently than they did a decade ago. How do we communicate with our partners? How is our research translated into impactful messaging to reach digital audiences? Success is keeping our rigor intact while getting the evidence to people the way they actually want to receive it.