From Our Leadership
Guttmacher has changed a good deal in the five decades since our founding. We’ve outgrown office space, added new staff and expanded our footprint in the sexual and reproductive health and rights movement to meet new challenges. Recently, we realized that our look and feel needed a bit of spit and polish.
That’s why we embarked, a year ago, on a comprehensive review of our brand identity. Surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews, strategy workshops and guidance from our consultant resulted in recommendations to sharpen our brand and make it more consistent and effective in communicating who we are today.
Guttmacher’s new logo is a wordmark—a text-only graphic expression of our name. We also updated our tagline to more explicitly convey our commitment to defending facts and generating evidence that drives action: Center facts. Shape policy. Advance sexual and reproductive rights.
This isn’t as drastic a shift as, say, Facebook morphing into Meta, or Twitter transforming into X or Google claiming the entire Alphabet. Guttmacher is still Guttmacher. Our new logo (intentionally designed in lowercase letters), tagline, colors and typography—applied across our website, social media channels and publications since our May brand launch—announce our intention to be more accessible to our audiences.
Which is more important than ever. Two years after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, we’re amassing more and more evidence of its dire effects. Abortion, transgender health care and contraception are being targeted in legislatures across the United States. Around the world, the rise of right-wing movements threatens the progress made in advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the Dobbs decision is fueling new attacks on bodily autonomy.
We’re thrilled to have found a brand identity that reflects our bold mission and our readiness to tackle the challenges of the moment. Thank you for your support.
Destiny Lopez and Jonathan Wittenberg
Acting Co-CEOs
Number Crunch
94% of municipal hospitals were providing abortions within the first two years of abortion law reform in Argentina.
Read more about this study, with our partner, Centro de Estudios de Población, of abortion service provision by public-sector facilities in three Argentine provinces in 2022 and January 2023.
Behind the Scenes
Documenting reproductive health among the Rohingya
In 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people fled persecution in Myanmar and crossed into Bangladesh. Today, nearly one million Rohingya refugees live in crowded makeshift camps in that nation’s Cox’s Bazar district.
Very little is known about how Rohingya women are managing unintended pregnancies in these conditions. Guttmacher researchers—in collaboration with our local partners, the BRAC University James P Grant School of Public Health and the Association for the Prevention of Septic Abortion, Bangladesh—decided to find out. The team initiated a multiyear study to collect data on Rohingya experiences with menstrual regulation, abortion and postabortion care, as well as providers’ experiences serving the sexual and reproductive health needs of this forcibly displaced population. This data is essential for the governments, UN and aid organizations, NGOs and advocates working to provide reproductive health care in the camps.
Minara Begum, an outreach worker for UN Women's Multi-Purpose Women’s Centre who is unaffiliated with Guttmacher's research, walks through Balukhali camp in 2018. Photo: UN Women/Allison Joyce
The research comprises three main components: a community-based survey of Rohingya women, a survey of health facilities in and near the camps and in-depth interviews with community stakeholders. But conducting fieldwork in one of the world’s largest refugee settings is particularly challenging. The people living in Cox’s Bazar struggle with limited access to basic necessities and extreme weather. Women and girls, in particular, also contend with gender-based violence and insufficient sanitation.
Kaosar Afsana, a professor of public health at BRAC University and that organization’s principal investigator for this project, worked closely with Guttmacher to secure fieldwork permissions and, later, to analyze the study data. “We didn’t understand that it would take such a long time for us to get approval to enter into the camp,” Afsana says of navigating the security measures imposed by the Bangladeshi government.
(L-R) Mira Tignor, Kaosar Afsana, Ann Moore and Rubina Hussain, senior research associate at Guttmacher and a member of the study team. Photo: Rubina Hussain
The research team made several intermittent visits onsite, starting in the fall of 2022. Besides strict security measures, including requirements that an escort accompany researchers at all times, transportation and toilet facilities were limited. “It was very, very hard to take care of oneself in the camps,” says Ann Moore, a principal research scientist with Guttmacher and the Institute’s principal investigator for this project. “It’s very difficult to get from A to B. There are a lot of places you can’t get to by road, so it just takes a lot of walking.”
One of the biggest challenges the team faced was the language barrier, according to Mira Tignor, a Guttmacher senior research assistant working on this project. “Rohingya is a spoken language, and there are very low literacy rates among the Rohingya population,” Tignor says. “We couldn’t really have a survey written in Rohingya language that would be accessible directly to our respondents.”
BRAC fieldworkers conducted the survey through oral interviews, communicating with participants in the Chittagonian dialect of Bangla—which is closely related to Rohingya—and recording responses on tablets. The survey went through multiple rounds of review because of the difficulty involved with translating sensitive terms accurately. “This fieldwork would not have been possible at all without our collaboration with our partners,” says Tignor. “They brought the experience and the fluency in the language that we didn’t have.”
Since completing the fieldwork in 2023, the research team has been analyzing the data and preparing a series of papers and presentations for dissemination events. Along with Guttmacher’s global communications colleagues, the team held events this past April in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and Cox’s Bazar to share preliminary findings.
“One thing that is really notable about the findings is how supportive the community is toward abortion or menstrual regulation. They are much more supportive than one would anticipate of a very conservative population,” says Moore. Other findings noted the perceived acceptable conditions for terminating a pregnancy. Those include the mother’s health risk, having more or very young children, undesirable camp living conditions and an unhealthy relationship with the partner.
Afsana notes that the Bangladeshi government found the initial study results “enlightening” and that officials have expressed interest in further efforts to document the reproductive health of the Rohingya women residing in Cox’s Bazar.
Which is exciting news, as there’s much more work to be done there and in other humanitarian settings. “There is still a great need to better understand abortion among displaced populations,” says Moore. “I think the need to better understand women’s pregnancy termination practices is extremely valid in all displaced populations.”
“We know that the context always varies,” says Afsana, who stresses that insights from the data that the team uncovered “could be applied to displaced populations in other parts of the world.”
Read one of the first studies from this body of work and watch for several more papers to be released starting later this summer. Story by global communications assistant Mariam Alburakeh.
(Clockwise from top left) Guttmacher research associate Octavia Mulhern, a member of the study team, walks between residences. Photo: Mira Tignor. Mira Tignor in a fieldworker debrief meeting. Photo: Octavia Mulhern. Dhaka dissemination event in April 2024. Photo: Ananna Farzana/BRAC. BRAC's Pragna Paramita Mondal, a member of the study team, and Mulhern collaborate on analysis at BRAC offices. Photo: Mira Tignor
Fast Facts
US teens face special barriers to obtaining abortions
People who want to end their pregnancy must contend with many logistic, legal and practical hurdles to accessing abortion care. For teenagers, however, the hurdles are higher.
That’s what our most recent examination of Guttmacher's Abortion Patient Survey (APS) data found. This research explored the traits and situations of adolescent abortion patients—those younger than 20—during the period just before the US Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
Our APS data are telling: Adolescents required more support than adult abortion-seekers and faced unique challenges in accessing abortion care. They often relied on others for transportation to a clinic, with two-thirds being driven by someone else. More than half paid out of pocket for their abortion, and a similar proportion delayed other expenses or sold something to cover the costs. And, of the 70% of adolescents who wanted to have their abortion sooner than they did:
- 19% said their abortion was delayed because they didn’t know where to get one
- 57% said their abortion was delayed because they didn’t know they were pregnant
What’s in store for teens post-Dobbs?
Abortion is currently banned in 14 states, and anti-abortion activists are purposely targeting teens’ access to abortion. Bans based on gestational duration, in particular, are pushing reproductive health care further out of reach for young people. In states with these bans, delayed care could easily mean missing the deadline to get an abortion.
We think teens deserve better. This vulnerable population deserves more research, resources and advocacy to support their ability to make decisions for themselves about their sexual and reproductive health.
We Recommend...
- Senior writer and translation associate Lisa Remez enjoyed Amy Schumer’s “wonderful, heartfelt depiction of an abortion” in Season 2 (Episode 9) of Hulu’s Life & Beth.
- Kelly Baden, our vice president for public policy, appreciated how Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake (“the pandemic novel I didn’t know I needed”) reminded her of the centrality, and commonality, of abortion care in women’s stories.
- The New York Times’s podcast series The Retrievals got a double-rec. Senior research assistant Mariah Menanno liked how it “showed the complexity of pain and motherhood,” and Communications & Publications Division coordinator McCall James loved that it portrayed how often women’s pain is ignored: “I binge-listened to all the episodes!"
- Editor Jenny Sherman discovered, among the captivating exhibits at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary prison museum, an artist installation highlighting the story of an heiress, her illegal abortion and the abortion provider’s imprisonment there in the 1950s.
Notions
Imani Gandy is an attorney, journalist and editor-at-large for Rewire News Group, where she covers law and courts and cohosts the Boom! Lawyered podcast. On social media and in her Angry Black Lady Chronicles blog, Gandy breaks down complex legal issues and cases related to reproductive health and bodily autonomy. In this video, she explains what’s at stake in the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA, for short) case that’s before the US Supreme Court.