This fact sheet was written by Talia Curhan. It was edited by Jenny Sherman.
Many states require patients to receive counseling before getting an abortion, whether it be a procedural or a medication abortion. In most of those states, patients must also wait for a specified period of time after receiving counseling before they can get their abortion. Some states with waiting periods also require in-person counseling, which necessitates two in-person visits: the first for counseling and the second for the abortion. Requiring that counseling take place in person, rather than via mail, fax, internet or phone, may be a barrier to receiving care at all, especially for people who must travel long distances to reach a provider, take time off from work, or secure child care or lodging. These dual requirements can increase costs and complicate scheduling, jeopardizing people’s ability to get the abortion care they need.
Waiting periods for abortion are medically unnecessary. They are required for almost no other medical procedure, and they do not make abortion care safer. Instead, they aim to deter people from getting an abortion or to compel them to reconsider a decision that the vast majority are already certain of by the time they contact a clinic.
Mandated counseling is also medically unnecessary because every state already requires that patients provide informed consent before undergoing medical treatment, meaning that patients must be given adequate and appropriate information about a procedure in order to understand and agree to it. However, abortion counseling requirements often undermine informed consent by making providers share information that is irrelevant or misleading. For example, some state counseling materials about abortion risks include misinformation about breast cancer or future fertility. Other states include misleading information on fetal pain that is neither necessary for care nor relevant at the gestational durations when most abortions take place. Many states include information in their counseling materials that is meant to promote childbirth, such as information about alternatives to abortion and requirements for paternal support.
Mandated counseling content and method of delivery vary by state and are marked accordingly in the tables below. Most information is conveyed verbally and through written materials, though certain topics require only one method of delivery. The tables also indicate which states supply content—including misinformation—in written materials, even though their laws do not require counseling on those topics. Details on each state’s requirements can be found in the statutes listed in the attached citation chart.