Reproductive health the clinics were closed at alarming rates since the Supreme Court ended federal abortion protections in 2022. Facing mounting social and economic pressures, at least 100 clinics closed between its fall Roe v. Wade and June 2025, the latest data available.
Every time a clinic closes, patients lose access to care, but it’s not just that: Entire communities lose comprehensive care providers for generations to come.
As a nurse, doula and executive director of the Reproductive Health Clinical Education and Advocacy Group Repro TLCI’ve seen firsthand how abortion restrictions and clinic closings are shrinking the pipeline of trained providers. This is even in states where access to abortion care remains quite strong.
The result is a medical workforce crisis that extends far beyond abortion access and threatens the future of reproductive health in communities nationwide.
Clinics are places of education
community reproductive health centers—clinics that operate independently of hospitals, major medical centers or Planned Parenthood affiliates—serve as a safety net for patients. These they provide 58 percent of abortion care nationwide.
They also provide vital training infrastructure for future healthcare providers.
Most medical and breastfeeding education The programs do not teach abortion care; providers who want to provide abortions to patients often must find, coordinate, and finance their own training opportunities at independent clinics—such as a self-organized medical rotation. And as more of these independent clinics close, these training opportunities diminish.
In some ways, this puts providers in a situation parallel to that faced by patients who want or need to terminate a pregnancy.
Many people face nearly impossible challenges in accessing abortion care: They must be navigated rising coststake time off work and drive or fly hundreds of miles to undergo a medical procedure. The average cost of an abortion in the US is $650 today. And abortion funds report that the cost of funding abortions has risen 30 percent from 2024.
For residents of banning states like Louisiana, additional travel, lodging and meal costs have increased 13 percent during the same period, bringing that cost to more than $1,100. This is an unfair burden, and the poor and BIPOC communities bear it disproportionately.
Providers looking to care for these patients now face similar challenges. An esteemed one 30 percent of family medicine and 45 percent of OB-GYN residency programs are located in states with complete or severe restrictions on abortion. In those places, medical and nursing students they are now forced to travel between countries to access education.
These systemic training barriers further exacerbate the racial disparities that already exist in clinical training.
Black, Latino, and Native American trained providers abound are underrepresented in medicine in general, and in reproductive health clinical specialties. A study 2020 from the Ryan Residency Training Program at the University of California, San Francisco, found that of family planning trainees, 8.5 percent were black and 4.1 percent were Hispanic/Latino.
The research shows that the lack of diversity in the health care workforce; it gets worse already significant racial disparities in reproductive healthsuch as higher rates of unintended pregnancies, premature births, reproductive cancers and maternal mortality. The implications of these inequalities are especially glaring among black women.
It also shows that the providers who intend or did exposure to abortion care during their training is the most likely plan for providing this care later in practice. To diversify the reproductive health workforce, we must increase educational opportunities for physicians of color.
Just as states that protect access to abortion, such as Illinois, Kansas, and Minnesota, are a lifeline for out-of-state patientsthey have also become the hubs of education for our nation’s future reproductive health workforce.
Repro TLC—in partnership with the Black Researchers Collective, Chicago South Side Birth Center, Chicago Volunteer Doulas, and Nurses for Sexual and Reproductive Health—examined this problem. Our research found that in Illinois, one of the states that treats the highest percentage of out-of-state patientscare providers report that legal uncertainty, lack of training and guidance, financial barriers, and emotional exhaustion bring unprecedented challenges for the Illinois workforce.
This is the precarious ecosystem that trainee providers must navigate to become our future abortion care workforce.
Take Allie Lahey-Seratt, who graduated from Simmons University as a nurse in 2025. After working as an organizer for years, Lahey-Seratt went to nursing school because she wanted to provide abortion and gender confirmation care—which were much needed in her community.
However, like many students working to become providers in this countryhe said, he didn’t get the education he needed in school. So, like many abortion providers, she found her own clinical training opportunities.
A friend told Lahey-Seratt Repro TLCwhich has run one personalized clinical training program has focused on abortion, termination, contraception and gender-affirming care since 2006. Connects student-providers with independent clinics, coordinates interstate travel and licensing logistics, insurance, goal setting with students, navigating legal agreements and more.
Over the years, we have coordinated more than 5,000 days of clinical education at 27 clinic sites in 17 states for providers from 25 states.
Lahey-Seratt began her training at Maine Family Planning, a network of clinics struggling to stay open in the face of Trump’s Medicaid cuts, in September 2025. With the support of a Repro TLC training coordinator, she obtained all the necessary insurance coverage, took state leave for her training days and rescheduled her school commitments so she could be in Maine three days a week. The Repro TLC scholarship also helped cover food and gas costs.
Some other organizations, incl Medical Students for Elective and the Barnett A. Slepian Fundsimilarly support future reproductive health care providers with training-related costs like these.
Lahey-Seratt rotated between multiple Maine family planning clinic locations throughout the state. In rural Dexter, he helped run a clinic with an exam room, a provider and a front desk clerk—open only one day a week: Wednesday.
“The fact that this clinic exists means a lot to people,” he said. “There were patients depending on it. People were so grateful.”
By the end of her rotation, Lahey-Seratt had observed, and in some cases practiced, skills such as compassionate counseling of all options, slot exams, transvaginal ultrasounds and abortion care.
“Unless your school is very committed to teaching you [these skills]I don’t know how else people learn [them],” Lahey-Seratt said, adding that her on-the-job training “actually gave me an opportunity” to learn.
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How will we train the next generation of providers?
Repro TLC isn’t the only group doing this kind of work. Groups like Sexual and Reproductive Health Nurses, Medical Students for Elective, TEACHand the Reproductive Health Access Project have formed a small network of non-profit organizations working to fill sexual and reproductive health education gaps.
Still, since then Dobbsfilling the gaps in clinical abortion education has become more difficult. Thirty states have significant abortion restrictions or outright bansforcing trainee providers to travel further to receive training, stay longer away from home and face increasing legal and logistical challenges.
Over the past four years, for example, education and related costs have risen from $3,500 to about $10,000 per student. For every four students we accept, we reject six applicants.
As more health centers close, we also see some clinics—both in areas with good abortion access and in restrictive areas—he was forced to make the difficult choice not to train so many students. This allows them to devote more of their limited capacity to patients, but exacerbates the training crisis.
Without our community clinics, how will we train the next generation of providers? And who will look after our communities in the future?
These questions should concern us all, because the future of reproductive health care depends on today’s clinical training infrastructure. To keep your community reproductive health clinic open, consider donating, volunteering and, of course, voting.
Remember: The 2026 midterm elections are just around the corner.
The post Who Will Train the Next Generation of Abortion Providers? appeared first on Rewire News Group.
