In May, Republican members of Congress asked each state to provide answers about how they regulate and monitor abortion services. The requests came from members of two congressional committees—the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the House Judiciary Committee—and were sent to state health departments and attorneys general, respectively.

Rewire.News sent requests to the health departments and attorneys general in every state, asking them to provide us with the same answers they gave to the congressional committees. To learn more about what this database contains, check out our methodology.

With answers now received from nearly every state, the results confirm our earlier analysis: that abortion is already policed and regulated aggressively, the opposite of the notion posited by anti-choice campaigners, who wrongly claimed that the medical procedure was putting women at risk.

How You Can Use This Database

The documents in this site will be useful to reporters, advocates, lawyers, campaigners, providers, and all those interested in reproductive health.

Search this site to find information on how many clinics exist in each state and how frequently those clinics are inspected, and view the actual forms that must be filled out by those who wish to open an abortion clinic.

See what kinds of action the state health authorities take when they identify compliance failures. Use the information to drill down into what actually constitutes a compliance failure: they can include issues as minor as failing to have a clinic’s ID number posted on the homepage of its website.

Learn how each state categorizes the types of facilities where abortions are provided. For instance, some states have a tiered system that imposes different licensure requirements for clinics that want to perform surgical abortions, or solely to provide medication abortions. And in other states, licensure is only required for facilities that provide more than a specified number of procedures in a given period of time.

Last updated March 4, 2018